I  LIBRARY 

I  UNIVERSITY  OF 
I  CALIFORNJA 

I  SAN  DIEGO 


presented  to  the 
UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
SAN  DIEGO 

by 


Mr.    Otto   T.    Hir.c^Phiov. 


THE  BOOK  OF  LIFE 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2007  with  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


http://www.archive.org/details/bookoflifemindboOOsinciala 


The 


Book  of  Life 

Mind  and  Body 


UPTON  SINCLAIR 


HALDEMAN -JULIUS  COMPANY 

GIRARD,  KANSAS 


INTRODUCTORY 

The  writer  of  this  book  has  been  in  this  world  some  forty- 
two  years.  That  may  not  seem  long  to  some,  but  it  is  long 
enough  to  have  made  many  painful  mistakes,  and  to  have 
learned  much  from  them.  Looking  about  him,  he  sees  others 
making  these  same  mistakes,  suffering  for  lack  of  that  same 
knowledge  which  he  has  so  painfully  acquired.  This  being  the 
case,  it  seems  a  friendly  act  to  offer  his  knowledge,  minus  the 
blunders  and  the  pain. 

There  come  to  the  writer  literally  thousands  of  letters 
every  year,  asking  him  questions,  some  of  them  of  the 
strangest.  A  man  is  dying  of  cancer,  and  do  I  think  it  can 
be  cured  by  a  fast  ?  A  man  is  unable  to  make  his  wife  happy, 
and  can  I  tell  him  what  is  the  matter  with  women?  A  man. 
has  invested  his  savings  in  mining  stock,  and  can  I  tell  him 
what  to  do  about  it?  A  man  works  in  a  sweatshop,  and  has 
only  a  little  time  for  self-improvement,  and  will  I  tell  him 
what  books  he  ought  to  read?  Many  such  questions  every 
day  make  one  aware  of  a  vast  mass  of  people,  earnest,  hungry 
for  happiness,  and  groping  as  if  in  a  fog.  (^he  things  they 
most  need  to  know  they  are  not  taught  in  the  schools,  nor  in 
the  newspapers  they  read,  nor  in  the  church  they  attend.  Of 
these  agencies,  the  first  is  not  entirely  competent,  the  second 
is  not  entirely  honest,  and  the  third  is  not  entirely  up  to  date^ 
Nor  is  there  anywhere  a  book  in  which  the  effort  has  been 
made  to  give  to  everyday  human  beings  the  everyday  informa- 
tion they  need  for  the  successful  living  of  their  lives. 

For  the  present  book  the  following  claims  may  be  made. 
First,  it  is  a  modern  book;  its  writer  watches  hour  by  hour 
the  new  achievements  of  the  human  mind,  he  reaches  out  for 
information  about  them,  he  seeks  to  adjust  his  own  thoughts 
to  them  and  to  test  them  in  his  own  living.  Second,  it  is,  or 
tries  hard  to  be,  a  wise  book;  its  writer  is  not  among  those 
too-ardent  young  radicals  who  leap  to  the  conclusion  that 
because  many  old  things  are  stupid  and  tiresome,  therefore 
everything  that  is  old  is  to  be  spurned  with  contempt,  and 
everything  that  proclaims  itself  new  is  to  be  taken  at  its  own 
valuation.     Third,  it  is  an  honest  book;  its  writer  will  not 


viii  Introductory 

pretend  to  know  what  he  only  guesses,- and  where  it  is  neces- 
sary to  guess,  he  will  say  so  frankly.  Finally,  it  is  a  kind 
book;  it  is  not  written  for  its  author's  glory,  nor  for  his 
enrichment,  but  to  tell  you  things  that  may  be  useful  to  you 
in  the  brief  span  of  your  life.  It  will  attempt  to  tell  you  how 
to  live,  how  to  find  health  and  happiness  and  success,  how  to 
v/ork  and  how  to  play,  how  to  eat  and  how  to  sleep,  how  to 
love  and  to  marry  and  to  care  for  your  children,  how  to  deal 
with  your  fellow  men  in  business  and  politics  and  social  life, 
how  to  act  and  how  to  think,  what  religion  to  believe,  what 
art  to  enjoy,  what  books  to  read.  A  large  order,  as  the  boys 
phrase  it! 

There  are  several  ways  for  such  a  book  to  begin.  It  might 
begin  with  the  child,  because  we  all  begin  that  way;  it  might 
begin  with  love,  because  that  precedes  the  child ;  it  might  begin 
with  the  care  of  the  body,  explaining  that  sound  physical  health 
is  the  basis  of  all  right  living,  and  even  of  right  thinking;  it 
might  begin  as  most  philosophies  do,  by  defining  life,  discussing 
its  origin  and  fundamental  nature. 

The  trouble  with  this  last  plan  is  that  there  are  a  lot  of 
people  who  have  their  ideas  on  life  made  up  in  tabloid  form ; 
they  have  creeds  and  catechisms  which  they  know  by  heart, 
and  if  you  suggest  to  them  anything  different,  they  give  you 
a  startled  look  and  get  out  of  your  way.  And  then  there  is 
another,  and  in  our  modern  world  a  still  larger  class,  who  say, 
"Oh,  shucks!  I  don't  go  in  for  religion  and  that  kind  of 
thing."  You  offer  them  something  that  looks  like  a  sermon, 
and  they  turn  to  the  baseball  page. 

Who  will  read  this  Book  of  Life?  There  will  be,  among 
others,  the  great  American  tired  business  man.  He  wrestles 
with  problems  and  cares  all  day,  and  when  he  sits  down  to 
read  in  the  evening,  he  says:  "Make  it  short  and  snappy." 
There  is  the  wife  of  the  tired  business  man,  the  American 
perfect  lady.  She  does  most  of  the  reading  for  the  family; 
but  she  has  never  got  down  to  anything  fundamental  in  her 
life,  and  mostly  she  likes  to  read  about  exciting  love  affairs, 
which  she  distinguishes  from  the  unexciting  kind  she  knows 
by  the  word  "romance."  Then  there  is  the  still  more  tired 
American  workingman,  who  has  been  "speeded  up"  all  day 
under  the  bonus  system  or  the  piece-work  system,  and  is  apt 
to  fall  asleep  in  his  chair  before  he  finishes  supper.  Then  there 
is  the  workingman's  wife,  who  has  slaved  all  day  in  the  kitchen. 


Introductory  ix 

and  has  a  chance  for  a  few  minutes'  intimacy  with  her  hus- 
band before  he  falls  asleep.  She  would  like  to  have  somebody 
tell  her  what  to  do  for  croup,  but  she  is  not  sure  that  she  has 
time  to  discuss  the  question  whether  life  is  worth  living. 

Yet,  I  wonder ;  is  there  a  single  one  among  all  these  tired  ^ 
people,  or  even  among  the  cynical  people,  who  has  not  had 
some  moment  of  awe  when  the  thought  came  stabbing  into  his 
mind  like  a  knife :  "What  a  strange  thing  this  life  is !  What 
am  I  anyhow?  Where  do  I  come  from,  and  what  is  going  to 
become  of  me?  What  do  I  mean,  what  am  I  here  for?" 
I  have  sat  chatting  with  three  hoboes  by  a  railroad  track,, 
cooking  themselves  a  mulligan  in  an  old  can,  and  heard  one 
of  them  say:  "By  God,  it's  a  queer  thing,  ain't  it,  mate?" 
I  have  sat  on  the  deck  of  a  ship,  looking  out  over  the  midnight 
ocean  and  talking  with  a  sailor,  and  heard  him  use  almost  the 
identical  words.  It  is  not  only  in  the  class-room  and  the 
schools  that  the  minds  of  men  are  grappling  with  the  funda- 
mental problems ;  in  fact,  it  was  not  from  the  schools  that  the 
new  religions  and  the  great  moral  impulses  of  humanity  took 
their  origin.  It  was  from  lonely  shepherds  sitting  on  the  hill- 
sides, and  from  fishermen  casting  their  nets,  and  from  car- 
penters and  tailors  and  shoemakers  at  their  benches. 

Stop  and  think  a  bit,  and  you  will  realize  it  does  make  a 
difference  what  you  believe  about  life,  how  it  comes  to  be, 
where  it  is  going,  and  what  is  your  place  in  it.  Is  there  a 
heaven  with  a  God,  who  watches  you  day  and  night,  and  knows 
every  thought  you  think,  and  will  some  day  take  you  to  eternal 
bliss  if  you  obey  his  laws?  If  you  really  beheve  that,  you  will 
try  to  find  out  about  his  laws,  and  you  will  be  comparatively 
little  concerned  about  the  success  or  failure  of  your  business. 
Perhaps,  on  the  other  hand,  you  have  knocked  about  in  the 
world  and  lost  your  "faith";  you  have  been  cheated  and  ex- 
ploited, and  have  set  out  to  "get  yours,"  as  the  phrase  is;  to 
"feather  your  own  nest."  But  some  gust  of  passion  seizes  you, 
and  you  waste  your  substance,  you  wreck  your  life ;  then  you 
wonder,  "Who  set  that  trap  and  baited  it?  Am  I  a  creature 
of  blind  instincts,  jealousies  and  greeds  and  hates  beyond  my 
own  control  entirely  ?  Am  I  a  poor,  feeble  insect,  blown  about 
in  a  storm  and  smashed?  Or  do  I  make  the  storm,  and  can 
I  in  any  part  control  it  ?" 

No  matter  how  busy  you  may  be,  no  matter  how  tired  you 
may  be,  it  will  pay  jrou  to  get  such  things  straight:  to  know 


X  Introductory 

a  little  of  what  the  wise  men  of  the  past  have  thought  about 
them,  and  more  especially  what  science  with  its  new  tools  of 
knowledge  may  have  discovered. 

The  writer  of  this  book  spent  nine  years  of  his  life  in 
colleges  and  universities ;  also  he  was  brought  up  in  a  church. 
So  he  knows  the  orthodox  teachings,  he  can  say  that  he  has 
given  to  the  recognized  wise  men  of  the  world  every  oppor- 
tunity to  tell  him  what  they  know.  Then,  being  dissatisfied, 
he  went  to  the  unrecognized  teachers,  the  enthusiasts  and  the 
"cranks"  of  a  hundred  schools.  Finally,  he  thought  for  him- 
self; he  was  even  willing  to  try  experiments  upon  himself. 
As  a  result,  he  has  not  found  what  he  claims  is  ultimate  or 
final  truth;  but  he  has  what  he  might  describe  as  a  rough 
working  draft,  a  practical  outline,  good  for  everyday  purposes. 
He  is  going  to  have  confidence  enough  in  you,  the  reader,  to 
give  you  the  hardest  part  first ;  that  is,  to  begin  with  the  great 
fundamental  questions.  What  is  life,  and  how  does  it  come 
to  be?  What  does  it  mean,  and  what  have  we  to  do  with  it? 
Are  we  its  masters  or  its  slaves?  What  does  it  owe  us,  and 
what  do  we  owe  to  it?  Why  is  it  so  hard,  and  do  we  have 
to  stand  its  hardness?  And  can  we  really  know  about  all 
these  matters,  or  will  we  be  only  guessing?  Can  we  trust  our- 
selves to  think  about  them,  or  shall  we  be  safer  if  we  believe 
what  we  are  told?  Shall  we  be  punished  if  we  think  wrong, 
and  how  shall  we  be  punished?  Shall  we  be  rewarded  if  we 
think  right,  and  will  the  pay  be  worth  the  trouble? 

Such  questions  as  these  I  am  going  to  try  to  answer  in  the 
simplest  language  possible.  I  would  avoid  long  words  alto- 
gether, if  I  could ;  but  some  of  these  long  words  mean  certain 
definite  things,  and  there  are  no  other  words  to  serve  the 
purpose.  You  do  not  refuse  to  engage  in  the  automobile  busi- 
ness because  the  carburetor  and  the  diflferential  are  words  of 
four  syllables.  Neither  should  you  refuse  to  get  yourself 
straight  with  the  universe  because  it  is  too  much  trouble  to 
go  to  the  dictionary  and  learn  that  the  word  "phenomenon" 
means  something  else  than  a  little  boy  who  can  play  the  piano 
or  do  long  division  in  his  head. 


CONTEXTS 

PART  ONE:  THE  BOOK  OF  THE  MIND 

PAGE 

Chapter  I.    The  Nature  of  Life 3 

Attempts  to  show  what  we  know  about  life;  to  set  the 
bounds  of  real  truth  as  distinguished  from  phrases  and 
self-deception. 

Chapter  II.    The  Nature  of  Faith 8 

Attempts  to  show  what  we  can  prove  by  our  reason,  and 
what  we  know  intuitively;  what  is  implied  in  the  process 
of  thinking,  and  without  which  no  thought  could  be. 

Chapter  III.    The  Use  of  Reason 12 

Attempts  to  show  that  in  the  field  to  which  reason  applies 
we  are  compelled  to  use  it,  and  are  justified  in  trusting  it. 

Chapter  IV.    The  Origin  of  Morality 17 

Compares  the  ways  of  Nature  with  human  morality,  and 
tries  to  show  how  the  latter  came  to  be. 

Chapter  V.    Nature  and  Man 21 

Attempts  to  show  how  man  has  taken  control  of  Nature, 
and  is  carrying  on  her  processes  and  improving  upon  them. 

Chapter  VI.    Man  the  Rebel 27 

Shows  the  transition  stage  between  instinct  and  reason, 
in  which  man  finds  himself,  and  how  he  can  advance  to 
a  securer  condition. 

Chapter  VII.    Making  Our  Morals 31 

Attempts  to  show  that  human  morality  must  change  to  fit 
human  facts,  and  there  can  be  no  judge  of  it  save  human 
reason. 

Chapter  VIII.    The  Virtue  of  Moderation 37 

Attempts  to  show  that  wise  conduct  is  an  adjustment  of 
means  to  ends,  and  depends  upon  the  understanding  of  a 
particular  set  of  circumstances. 


xii  Contents 

PAGE 

Chapter  IX.    The  Choosing  of  Life 42 

Discusses  the  standards  by  which  we  may  judge  what  is 
best  in  life,  and  decide  what  we  wish  to  make  of  it. 

Chapter  X.    Myself  and  My  Neighbor 50 

Compares  the  new  morality  with  the  old,  and  discusses  the 
relative  importance  of  our  various  duties. 

Chapter  XL    The  Mind  and  the  Body 53 

Discusses  the  interaction  between  physical  and  mental 
things,  and  the  possibility  of  freedom  in  a  world  of  fixed 
causes. 

Chapter  XIL    The  Mind  of  the  Body 61 

Discusses  the  subconscious  mind,  what  it  is,  what  it  does 
to  the  body,  and  how  it  can  be  controlled  and  made  use 
of  by  the  intelligence. 

Chapter  XIIL    Exploring  the  Subconscious 67 

Discusses  automatic  writing,  the  analysis  of  dreams,  and 
other  methods  by  which  a  new  universe  of  life  has  been 
brought  to  human  knowledge. 

Chapter  XIV.    The  Problem  of  Immortality 74 

Discusses  the  survival  of  personality  from  the  moral  point 
of  view:  that  is,  have  we  any  claim  upon  life,  entitling 
us  to  live  forever? 

Chapter  XV.    The  Evidence  for  Survival 81 

Discusses  the  data  of  psychic  research,  and  the  proofs  of 
spiritism  thus  put  before  us. 

Chapter  XVL    The  Powers  of  the  Mind 91 

Sets  forth  the  fact  that  knowledge  is  freedom  and  igno- 
rance is  slavery,  and  what  science  means  to  the  people. 

Chapter  XVII.    The  Conduct  of  the  Mind 98 

Concludes  the  Book  of  the  Mind  with  a  study  of  how  to 
preserve  and  develop  its  powers  for  the  protection  of  our 
lives  and  the  lives  of  all  men. 


Contents  ^ii 

PART  TWO:  THE  BOOK  OF  THE  BODY 

PAGE 

Chapter  XVHI.    The  Unity  of  the  Body 105 

Discusses  the  body  as  a  whole,  and  shows  that  health  is 
not  a  matter  of  many  different  organs  and  functions,  but 
is  one  problem  of  one  organism. 

Chapter  XIX.    Experiments  in  Diet    . 115 

Narrates  the  author's  adventures  in  search  of  health,  and 
his  conclusions  as  to  what  to  eat. 

Chapter  XX.    Errors  in  Diet 123 

Discusses  the  different  kinds  of  foods,  and  the  part  they 
play  in  the  making  of  health  and  disease. 

Chapter  XXI.    Diet  Standards 134 

Discusses  various  foods  and  their  food  values,  the  quan- 
tities we  need,  and  their  money  cost 

Chapter  XXII.    Foods  and  Poisons 145 

Concludes  the  subject  of  diet,  and  discusses  the  effect  upon 
the  system  of  stimulants  and  narcotics. 

Chapter  XXIII.    More  About  Health 156 

Discusses  the  subjects  of  breathing  and  ventilation,  cloth- 
ing, bathing  and  sleep. 

Chapter  XXIV.    Work  and  Play 163 

Deals  with  the  question  of  exercise,  both  for  the  idle  and 
the  overworked. 

Chapter  XXV.    The  Fasting  Cure 169 

Deals  with  Nature's  own  remedy  for  disease,  and  how  to 
make  use  of  it. 

Chapter  XXVI.    Breaking  the  Fast 177 

Discusses  various  methods  of  building  up  the  body  after 
a  fast,  especially  the  milk  diet. 

Chapter  XXVII.    Diseases  and  Cures 182 

Discusses  some  of  the  commoner  human  ailments,  and 
what  is  known  about  their  cause  and  cure. 


PART  ONE 

THE  BOOK  OF  THE  MIND 


CHAPTER  I 


THE  NATURE  OF  LIFE 


(Attempts  to  show  what  we  know  about  life;  to  set  the  bounds 
of  real  truth  as  distinguished  from  phrases  and  self-deception.) 

If  I  could,  I  would  begin  this  book  by  telling  you  whatt 
Life  is.  But  unfortunately  I  do  not  know  what  Life  is.  The^ 
only  consolation  I  can  find  is  in  tjie  fact  that  nobody  elseJ 
knows  either. 

We  ask  the  churches,  and  they  tell  us  that  male  and  female 
created  He  them,  and  put  them  in  the  Garden  of  Eden,  and 
they  would  have  been  happy  had  not  Satan  tempted  them. 
But  then  you  ask,  who  made  Satan,  and  the  explanation  grows 
vague.  You  ask,  if  God  made  Satan,  and  knew  what  Satan 
was  going  to  do,  is  it  not  the  same  as  if  God  did  it  himself  ? 
So  this  explanation  of  the  origin  of  evil  gets  you  no  further 
than  the  Hindoo  picture  of  the  world  resting  on  the  back  of 
a  tortoise,  and  the  tortoise  on  the  head  of  a  snake — and  noth- 
ing said  as  to  what  the  snake  rests  on. 

Let  us  go  to  the  scientist.  I  know  a  certain  physiologist, 
perhaps  the  greatest  in  the  world,  and  his  eager  face  rises 
before  me,  and  I  hear  his  quick,  impetuous  voice  declaring 
that  he  knows  what  Life  is;  he  has  told  it  in  several  big 
volumes,  and  all  I  have  to  do  is  to  read  them.  Life  is  a 
tropism,  caused  by  the  presence  of  certain  combinations  of 
chemicals ;  my  friend  knows  this,  because  he  has  produced  the 
thing  in  his  test-tubes.  He  is  an  exponent  of  a  way  of  thought 
called  Monism,  which  finds  the  ultimate  source  of  being  in 
forms  of  energy  manifesting  themselves  as  matter;  he  shows 
how  all  living  things  arise  from  that  and  sink  back  into  it. 

But  question  this  scientist  more  closely.  What  is  this 
"matter"  that  you  are  so  sure  of?  How  do  you  know  it? 
Obviously,  through  sensations.  You  never  know  matter  itself, 
you  only  know  its  effects  upon  you,  and  you  assume  that  the 
matter  must  be  there  to  cause  the  sensation.  In  other  words, 
"matter,"  which  seems  so  real,  turns  out  to  be  merely  "a 
permanent  possibility  of  sensation."  And  suppose  there  were 
to  be  sensations,  caused,  for  example,  by  a  sportive  demon 

2— July  22.  2 


4  Mind  and  Body 

who  liked  to  make  fun  of  eminent  physiologists — ^then  there 
might  be  the  appearance  of  matter  and  nothing  else ;  in  other 
words,  there  might  be  mind,  and  various  states  of  mind.  So 
we  discover  that  the  materialist,  in  the  philosophic  sense,  is 
making  just  as  large  an  act  of  faith,  is  pronouncing  just  as 
bold  a  dogma  as  any  priest  of  any  religion. 

This  is  an  old-time  topic  of  disputation.  Before  Mother 
Eddy  there  was  Bishop  Berkeley,  and  before  Berkeley,  there 
was  Plato,  and  they  and  the  materialists  disputed  until  their 
hearers  cried  in  despair,  "What  is  Mind  ?  No  matter !  What 
is  Matter?  Never  mind!"  But  a  century  or  two  ago  in  a 
town  of  Prussia  there  lived  a  little,  dried-up  professor  of 
philosophy,  who  sat  himself  down  in  his  room  and  fixed  his 
eyes  on  a  church  steeple  outside  the  window,  and  for  years 
on  end  devoted  himself  to  examining  the  tools  of  thought  with 
which  the  human  mind  is  provided,  and  deciding  just  what 
work  and  how  much  of  it  they  are  fitted  to  do.  So  came  the 
proof  that  our  minds  are  incapable  of  reaching  to  or  dealing 
with  any  ultimate  reality  whatever,  but  can  comprehend  only 
phenomena — that  is  to  say,  appearances — and  their  relations 
one  with  another.  The  Koenigsberg  professor  proved  this 
once  for  all  time,  setting  forth  four  propositions  about  ulti- 
mate reality,  and  proving  them  by  exact  and  irrefutable  logic, 
and  then  proving  by  equally  exact  and  irrefutable  logic  their 
precise  opposites  and  contraries.  Anybody  who  has  read  and 
comprehended  the  four  "antinomies"  of  Immanuel  Kant* 
knows  that  metaphysics  is  as  dead  a  subject  as  astrology,  and 
that  all  the  complicated  theories  which  the  philosophers  from 
Heraclitus  to  Arthur  Balfour  have  spun  like  spiders  out  of 
their  inner  consciousness,  have  no  more  relation  to  reality 
than  the  intricacies  of  the  game  of  chess. 

The  writer  is  sorry  to  make  this  statement,  because  he 
spent  a  lot  of  time  reading  these  philosophers  and  acquainting 
himself  with  their  subtle  theories.  He  learned  a  whole  lan- 
guage of  long  words,  and  even  the  special  meanings  which 
each  philosopher  or  school  of  philosophers  give  to  them.  When 
he  had  got  through,  he  had  learned,  so  far  as  metaphysics  is 
concerned,  absolutely  nothing,  and  had  merely  the  job  of 
clearing  out  of  his  mind  great  masses  of  verbal  cobwebs. 
It  was  not  even  good  intellectual  training;  the  metaphysical 
method  of  thought  is  a  trap.    The  person  who  thinks  in  abso- 

*See  Panlsen:  "Uit  of  Kant" 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  5 

lutes  and  ultimates  is  led  to  believe  that  he  has  come  to  con- 
clusions about  reality,  when  as  a  matter  of  fact  he  has  merely 
proved  what  he  wants  to  believe;  if  he  had  wanted  to  believe 
the  opposite,  he  could  have  proven  that  exactly  as  well — ^as  his 
opponents  will  at  once  demonstrate. 

If  you  multiply  two  feet  by  two  feet,  the  result  repre- 
sents a  plain  surface,  or  figure  of  two  dimensions.  If  you 
multiply  two  feet  by  two  feet  by  two  feet,  you  have  a  solid, 
or  figure  of  three  dimensions — such  as  the  world  in  which 
we  live  and  move.  But  now,  suppose  you  multiply  two 
feet  by  two  feet  by  two  feet  by  two  feet,  what  does  that 
represent?  For  ages  the  minds  of  mathematicians  and 
philosophers  have  been  tempted  by  this  fascinating  prob- 
lem of  the  "fourth  dimension."  They  have  worked  out  by 
analogy  what  such  a  world  would  be  like.  If  you  went  into 
this  "fourth  dimension,"  you  could  turn  yourself  inside  out, 
and  come  back  to  our  present  world  in  that  condition,  and 
no  one  of  your  three-dimension  friends  would  be  able  to 
imagine  how  you  had  managed  it,  or  to  put  you  back  again 
the  way  you  belonged.  And  in  this,  it  seems  to  me,  we  have  the 
perfect  analogy  of  metaphysical  thinking.  It  is  the  "fourth 
dimension"  of  the  mind,  and  plays  as  much  havoc  with  sound 
thinking  as  a  physical  "fourth  dimension"  would  plav  with — 
say,  the  prison  system.  A  man  who  takes  up  an  absolute — 
God,  immortality,  the  origin  of  being,  a  first  cause,  free  will, 
absolute  right  or  wrong,  infinite  time  or  space,  final  truth, 
original  substance,  the  "thing  in  itself" — ^that  man  disappears 
into  a  fourth  dimension,  and  turns  himself  inside  out  or 
upside  down  or  hindside  foremost,  and  comes  back  and  exhibits 
himself  in  triumph ;  then,  when  he  is  ready,  he  effects  another 
disappearance,  and  another  change,  and  is  back  on  earth  an 
ordinary  human  being. 

The  world  is  full  of  schools  of  thought,  theologians  and 
metaphysicians  and  professors  of  academic  philosophy,  tran- 
scendentalists  and  theosophists  and  Christian  Scientists,  who 
perform  such  mental  monkey-shines  continuously  before  our 
eyes.  fThey  prove  what  they  please,  and  the  fact  that  no  two 
of  theifl  prove  the  same  thing  makes  clear  to  us  in  the  end 
that  none  of  them  has  proved  anything.  The  Christian  Scien- 
tist asserts  that  there"ls~no  such  thmg  as  matter,  but  that  pain 
is  merely  a  delusion  of  mortal  mind;  he  continues  serene  in 
this  faith  imtil  he  runs  into  an  automobile  and  sustains  a  com- 


6  Mind  and  Body 

pound  fracture  of  the  femur — whereupon  he  does  exactly  what 
any  of  the  rest  of  us  do,  goes  to  a  competent  surgeon  and 
has  the  bone  set.  On  the  other  hand,  some  devoted  young 
SociaHsts  of  my  acquaintance  have  read  Haeckel  and  Dietzgen, 
and  adopted  the  dogma  that  matter  is  the  first  cause,  and 
that  all  things  have  grown  out  of  it  and  return  to  it;  they 
have  seen  that  the  brain  decays  after  death,  they  declare  that 
the  soul  is  a  function  of  the  brain — and  because  of  such 
theories  they  deliberately  reject  the  most  powerful  modes 
of  appeal  whereby  men  can  be  swayed  to  faith  in  human 
solidarity. 

1  he  best  books  I  know  for  the  sweeping  out  of  meta- 
physical cobwebs  are  "The  Philosophy  of  Comrnon  Sense"  and 
"The  Creed  of  a  Layman,"  "by  Frederic  Harrison,  leader  of 
the  English  Positivists,  a  school  of  thought  established  by 
Auguste  Comte.  But  even  as  I  recommend  these  books^  I 
recall  the  dissatisfaction  with  which  I  left  them;  for  it  ap- 
pears that  the  Positivists  have  their  dogmas  like  all  the  rest. 
Mr.  Harrison  is  not  content  to  say  that  mankind  has  not  the 
mental  tools  for  dealing  with  ultimate  realities ;  he  must  needs 
prove  that  mankind  never  will  and  never  can  have  these  tools. 
I  look  back  upon  the  long  process  of  evolution  and  ask  myself. 
What  would  an  oyster  think  about  Positivism?  What  would 
be  the  opinion  of,  let  us  say,  a  young  turnip  on  the  subject 
of  Mr.  Frederic  Harrison's  thesis?  It  may  well  be  that  the 
difference  between  a  turnip  and  Mr.  Harrison  is  not  so  great 
as  will  be  the  difference  between  Mr.  Harrison  and  that  super- 
race  which  some  day  takes  possession  of  the  earth  and  of  all 
the  universe.  It  does  not  seem  to  me  good  science  or  good 
sense  to  dogmatize  about  what  this  race  will  know,  or  what 
will  be  its  tools  of  thought.  What  does  seem  to  me  good 
science  and  good  sense  is  to  take  the  tools  which  we  now 
possess  and  use  them  to  their  utmost  capacity. 

What  is  it  that  we  know  about  life  ?  We  know  a  seemingly 
endless  stream  of  sensations  which  manifest  themselves  in 
certain  ways,  and  seem  to  inhere  in  what  we  call  things  and 
beings.  We  observe  incessant  change  in  all  these  phenomena, 
and  we  examine  these  changes  and  discover  their  ways.  The 
ways  seem  to  be  invariable ;  so  completely  so  that  for  practical 
purposes  we  assume  them  to  be  invariable,  and  base  all  our 
calculations  and  actions  upon  this  assumption.  Manifestly, 
we  could  not  live  otherwise,  and  the  spread  of  scientific  knowl- 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  7 

edge  is  the  further  tracing  out  of  such  "laws" — that  is  to  say, 
the  ways  of  behaving  of  existence — and  the  extending  of  our 
belief  in  their  invariability  to  wider  an^  wider  fields. 

Once  upon  a  time  we  were  told  that  "the  wind  bloweth 
where  it  listeth."  But  now  we  are  quite  certain  that  there 
are  causes  for  the  blowing  of  the  wind,  and  when  our  re- 
searches have  been  carried  far  enough,  we  shall  be  able  to 
account  for  and  to  predict  every  smallest  breath  of  air.  Once 
we  were  told  that  dreams  came  from  a  supernatural  world; 
but  now  we  are  beginning  to  analyze  dreams,  and  to  explain 
what  they  come  from  and  what  they  mean.  Perhaps  we  still 
find  human  nature  a  bewildering  and  unaccountable  thing; 
but  some  day  we  shall  know  enough  of  man's  body  and  his 
mind,  his  past  and  his  present,  to  be  able  to  explain  human 
nature  and  to  produce  it  at  will,  precisely  as  today  we  produce 
certain  reactions  in  our  test-tubes,  and  do  it  so  invariably  that 
the  most  cautious  financier  will  invest  tens  of  millions  of 
dollars  in  a  process,  and  never  once  reflect  that  he  is  putting 
too  much  trust  in  the  permanence  of  nature. 

In  many  departments  of  thought  great  specialists  are  now 
working,  experimenting  and  observing  by  the  methods  of 
science.  If  in  the  course  of  this  book  we  speak  of  "certainty," 
we  mean,  of  course,  not  the  "absolute"  certainty  of  any  meta- 
physical dogma,  but  the  practical  certainty  of  everyday  com- 
mon sense;  the  certainty  we  feel  that  eating  food  will  satisfy 
our  hunger,  and  that  tomorrow,  as  today,  two  and  two  will 
continue  to  make  four. 


CHAPTER  II 
THE  NATURE  OF  FAITH 

(Attempts  to  show  what  we  can  prove  by  our  reason,  and 
what  we  know  intuitively ;  what  is  implied  in  the  process  of  think- 
ing, and  without  which  no  thought  could  be.) 

The  primary  fact  that  we  know  about  life  is  growth.  Her- 
bert Spencer  has  defined  this  growth,  or  evolution,  in  a  string 
of  long  words  which  may  be  summed  up  to  mean :  the  process 
whereby  a  number  of  things  which  are  simple  and  like  one 
another  become  different  parts  of  one  thing  which  is  complex. 
If  we  observe  this  process  in  ourselves,  and  the  symptoms  of 
it  in  others,  we  discover  that  when  it  is  proceeding  success- 
fully, it  is  accompanied  by  a  sensation  of  satisfaction  which 
we  call  happiness  or  pleasure;  also  that  when  it  is  thwarted 
or  repressed,  it  is  accompanied  by  a  different  sensation  which 
we  call  pain.  Subtle  metaphysicians,  both  inside  the  churches 
and  out,  have  set  themselves  to  the  task  of  proving  that  there 
must  be  some  other  object  of  life  than  the  continuance  of  these 
sensations  of  pleasure  which  accompany  successful  growth. 
They  have  proven  to  their  own  satisfaction  that  morality  will 
collapse  and  human  progress  come  to  an  end  unless  we  can 
find  some  other  motive,  something  more  permanent  and  more 
stimulating,  something  "higher,"  as  they  phrase  it.  All  I  can 
say  is  that  I  gave  reverent  attention  to  the  arguments  of  these 
moralists  and  theologians,  and  that  for  many  years  I  believed 
their  doctrines ;  but  I  believe  them  no  longer. 

I  interpret  the  purpose  of  life  to  be  the  continuous  unfold- 
ment  of  its  powers,  its  growth  into  higher  forms — ^that  is  to 
say,  forms  more  complex  and  subtly  contrived,  capable  of 
more  intense  and  enduring  kinds  of  that  satisfaction  which  is 
nature's  warrant  of  life.  If  you  wish  to  take  up  this  state- 
ment and  argue  about  it,  please  wait  until  you  have  read  the 
chapter  "Nature  and  Man,"  and  noted  my  distinction  between 
instinctive  life  and  rational  life.  For  men,  the  word  "growth" 
does  not  mean  any  growth,  all  growth,  blind  and  indiscriminate 
growth.  It  does  not  mean  growth  for  the  tubercle  bacillus, 
nor  growth  for  the  anopheles  mosquito,  nor  growth  for  the 

8 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  9 

house-fly,  the  spider  and  the  louse.  Neither  do  we  mean 
that  the  purpose  of  man's  own  Hfe  is  any  pleasure,  all 
pleasure,  blind  and  indiscriminate  pleasure;  the  pleasure  of 
alcohol,  the  pleasure  of  cannibalism,  the  pleasure  of  the  modern 
form  of  cannibalism  which  we  call  "making  money."  We 
have  survived  in  the  struggle  for  existence  by  the  cooperative 
and  social  use  of  our  powers  of  judgment ;  and  our  judgment 
is  that  which  selects  among  forms  of  growth,  which  gives 
preference  to  wheat  and  corn  over  weeds,  and  to  self-control 
and  honesty  over  treachery  and  greed. 

So  when  we  say  that  the  purpose  of  life  is  happiness,  we 
do  not  mean  to  turn  mankind  loose  at  a  hog-trough ;  we  mean 
that  our  duty  as  thinkers  is  to  watch  life,  to  test  it,  to  pick 
and  choose  among  the  many  forms  it  offers,  and  to  say :  This 
kind  of  growth  is  more  permanent  and  full  of  promise,  it  is 
more  fertile,  more  deeply  satisfactory;  therefore,  we  choose 
this,  and  sanction  the  kind  of  pleasure  which  it  brings.  Other 
kinds  we  decide  are  temporary  and  delusive ;  therefore  we  put 
in  jail  anyone  who  sells  alcoholic  drink,  and  we  refuse  to 
invite  to  our  home  people  who  are  lewd,  and  some  day  we  shall 
not  permit  our  children  to  attend  moving  picture  shows  in 
which  the  modem  form  of  cannibalism  is  glorified. 

The  reader,  no  doubt,  has  been  taught  a  distinction  between 
"science"  and  "faith."  He  is  saying  now,  "You  believe  that 
everything  is  to  be  determined  by  human  reason?  You  reject 
all  faith?"  I  answer,  No;  I  am  not  rejecting  faith;  I  am 
merely  refusing  to  apply  it  to  objects  with  which  it  has  nothing 
to  do.  You  do  not  take  it  as  a  matter  of  faith  that  a  package 
of  sugar  weighs  a  pound;  you  put  it  on  the  scales  and  find 
out — in  other  words,  you  make  it  a  matter  of  experiment.  But 
all  the  creeds  of  all  the  religious  sects  are  full  of  pronounce- 
ments which  are  no  more  matters  of  faith  than  the  question 
of  the  weighing  of  sugar.  Is  pork  a  wholesome  article  of 
food  or  is  it  not?  All  Christians  will  readily  acknowledge 
that  this  is  a  matter  to  be  determined  by  the  microscope  and 
other  devices  of  experimental  science ;  but  then  some  Jew 
rises  in  the  meeting  and  puts  the  question:  Is  dancing  in- 
jurious to  the  character  ?  And  immediately  all  members  of  the 
Methodist  Episcopal  Church  vote  to  close  the  discussion. 

What  is  faith?  pFaith  is  the  instinct  which  underlies  all 
being,  assuring  us  that  life  is  worth  while  and  honest,  a  thing 
to  be  trusted ;  ;in  other  words,  it  is  the  certainty  that  successf  lU 


A<>  Mind  and  Body 

growth  always  is  and  always  will  be  accompanied  by  pleasure. 
The  most  skeptical  scientist  in  the  world,  even  my  friend  the 
physiologist  who  proves  that  life  is  nothing  but  a  tropism, 
and  can  be  produced  by  mixing  chemicals  in  test-tubes — ^this 
eager  friend  is  one  of  the  most  faithful  men  I  know.  He 
is  burning  up  with  the  faith  that  knowledge  is  worth  possessing, 
and  also  that  it  is  possible  of  attainment.  With  what  bound- 
less scorn  woul-d  he  receive  any  suggestion  to  the  contrary — 
for  example,  the  idea  that  life  might  be  a  series  of  sensations 
which  some  sportive  demon  is  producing  for  the  torment  ot 
man !  More  than  that,  this  friend  is  burning  up  with  the  cer- 
tainty that  knowledge  can  be  spread,  that  his  fellow  men  will 
receive  it  and  apply  it,  and  that  it  will  make  them  happy  when 
they  do.  Why  else  does  he  write  his  learned  books  in  defense 
of  the  materialist  philosophy? 

And  that  same  faith  which  animates  the  great  monist  ani- 
mates likewise  every  child  who  toddles  off  to  school,  and  every 
chicken  which  emerges  from  an  egg,  and  every  blade  of  grass 
which  thrusts  its  head  above  the  ground.  Not  every  chicken 
survives,  of  course,  and  all  the  blades  of  grass  wither  in  the 
fall ;  nevertheless,  the  seeds  of  grass  are  spread,  and  chickens 
make  food  for  philosophers,  and  the  great  process  of  life  con- 
tinues to  manifest  its  faith.  In  the  end  the  life  process  pro- 
duces man,  who,  as  we  shall  presently  see,  takes  it  up,  and 
judges  it,  and  makes  it  over  to  suit  himself. 

You  will  note  from  this  that  I  am  what  is  called  an  opti- 
mist; whereas  some  of  the  great  philosophers  of  the  world 
have  called  themselves  pessimists.  But  I  notice  with  a  smile 
that  these  are  often  the  men  who  work  hardest  of  all  to  spread 
their  ideas,  and  thus  testify  to  the  worthwhileness  of  truth 
and  the  perfectibility  of  mankind.  There  has  come  to  be  a 
saying  among  settlement  workers  and  physicians,  who  are 
familiar  with  poverty  and  its  effects  upon  life,  that  there  are 
no  bad  babies  and  good  babies,  there  are  only  sick  babies  and 
well  babies.  In  the  same  way,  I  would  say  there  are  no  pessi- 
mists and  optimists,  there  are  only  mentally  sick  people  and 
mentally  well  people.  Everywhere  throughout  life,  both  ani- 
mal and  vegetable,  health  means  happiness,  and  gives  abundant 
evidence  of  that  fact.  All  healthy  life  is  satisfactory  to  itself; 
when  it  develops  reason,  it  tries  to  find  out  why,  and  this  is 
yet  another  testimony  to  the  fact  that  having  power  and  using 
it  is  pleasant.     When  I  was  in  college  the  professor  would 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  11 

propound  the  old  question:  "Would  you  rather  be  a  happy 
pig  or  an  unhappy  philosopher?"  My  answer  always  was: 
"I  would  rather  be  a  happy  philosopher,"  The  professor  re- 
plied: "Perhaps  that  is  not  possible."  But  I  said:  "I  will 
prove  that  it  is!" 


CHAPTER  III 
THE  USE  OF  REASON 

(Attempts  to  show  that  in  the  field  to  which  reason  applies 
we  are  compelled  to  use  it,  and  are  justified  in  trusting  it) 

The  great  majority  of  people  are  brought  up  to  believe  that 
some  particular  set  of  dogmas  are  objects  of  faith,  and  that 
there  are  penalties  more  or  less  severe  for  the  application  of 
reason  to  these  dogmas.  What  particular  set  it  happens  to 
be  is  a  matter  of  geography;  in  a  crowded  modern  city  like 
New  York,  it  is  a  matter  of  the  particular  block  on  which  the 
child  is  born.  A  child  born  on  Hester  Street  will  be  taught 
that  his  welfare  depends  upon  his  never  eating  meat  and  butter 
from  the  same  dish.  A  child  born  on  Tenth  Avenue  will  be 
taught  that  it  is  a  matter  of  his  not  eating  meat  on  Fridays. 
A  child  born  on  Madison  Avenue  will  be  taught  that  it  is  a 
question  of  the  precise  metaphysical  process  by  which  bread  is 
changed  into  human  body  and  wine  into  human  blood.  Each 
of  these  children  will  be  assured  that  his  human  reason  is 
fallible,  that  it  is  extremely  dangerous  to  apply  it  to  this 
"sacred"  subject,  and  that  the  proper  thing  to  do  is  to  accept 
the  authority  of  some  ancient  tradition,  or  some  institution,  or 
some  official,  or  some  book  for  which  a  special  sanction  is 
claimed. 

Has  there  ever  been  in  the  world  any  revelation,  outside 
of  or  above  human  reason?  Could  there  ever  be  such  a  thing? 
In  order  to  test  this  possibility,  select  for  yourself  the  most 
convincing  way  by  which  a  special  revelation  could  be  handed 
down  to  mankind.  Take  any  of  the  ancient  orthodox  ways, 
the  finding  of  graven  tablets  on  a  mountain-top,  or  a  voice 
speaking  from  a  burning  bush,  or  an  angel  appearing  before 
a  great  concourse  of  people  and  handing  out  a  written  scroll. 
Suppose  that  were  to  happen,  let  us  say,  at  the  next  Yale- 
Harvard  football  game;  suppose  the  news  were  to  be  flashed 
to  the  ends  of  the  earth  that  God  had  thus  presented  to  man- 
kind an  entirely  new  religion.  What  would  be  the  process  by 
which  the  people  of  London  or  Calcutta  would  decide  upon 
that  revelation  ?    First,  they  would  have  to  consider  the  ques- 

12 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  13 

tion  whether  it  was  an  American  newspaper  fake — ^by  no 
means  an  easy  question.  Second,  they  would  have  to  consider 
the  chances  of  its  being  an  optical  delusion.  Then,  assuming 
they  accepted  the  sworn  testimony  of  ten  thousand  mature 
and  competent  witnesses,  they  would  have  to  consider  the  pos- 
sibility of  someone  having  invented  a  new  kind  of  invisible 
aeroplane.  Assuming  they  were  convinced  that  it  was  really 
a  supernatural  being,  they  would  next  have  to  decide  the 
chances  of  its  being  a  visitor  from  Mars,  or  from  the  fourth 
dimension  of  space,  or  from  the  devil.  In  considering  all  this, 
they  would  necessarily  have  to  examine  the  alleged  revelation. 
What  was  the  literary  quality  of  it?  What  was  the  moral 
quality  of  it  ?  What  would  be  the  effect  upon  mankind  if  the 
alleged  revelation  were  to  be  universally  adopted  and  applied  ? 

Manifestly,  all  these  are  questions  for  the  human  reason, 
the  human  judgment ;  there  is  no  other  method  of  determining 
them,  there  would  be  nothing  for  any  individual  person,  or  for 
men  as  a  whole  to  do,  except  to  apply  their  best  powers,  and, 
as  the  phrase  is,  "make  up  their  minds"  about  the  matter. 
Reason  would  be  the  judge,  and  the  new  revelation  would  be 
the  prisoner  at  the  bar.  Humanity  might  say,  this  is  a  real 
inspiration,  we  will  submit  ourselves  to  it  and  follow  it,  and 
allow  no  one  from  now  on  to  question  it.  But  inevitably  there 
would  be  some  who  would  say,  "Tommyrot!"  There  would 
be  others  who  would  say,  "This  new  revelation  isn't  working, 
it  is  repressing  progress,  it  is  stifling  the  mind."  These  people 
would  stand  up  for  their  conviction,  they  would  become 
martyrs,  and  all  the  world  would  have  to  discuss  them.  And 
who  would  decide  between  them  and  the  great  mass  of  men  ? 
Reason,  the  judge,  would  decide. 

It__is_perfectly  true  that  human  reason  is  fallible.  In- 
fallibility is  an  absolute,  a  concept  of  the  mind,  and  not  a 
reality.  Life  has  not  given  us  infallibility,  any  more  than  it 
has  given  us  omniscience,  or  omnipotence,  or  any  other  of 
those  attributes  which  we  call  divine.  Life  has  given  us 
powers,  more  or  less  weak,  more  or  less  strong,  but  all  capable 
of  improvement  and  development.  Reason  is  the  tool  whereby 
mankind  has  won  supremacy  over  the  rest  of  the  animal 
kingdom,  and  is  gradually  taking  control  of  the  forces  of 
nature.  It  is  the  best  tool  we  have,  and  because  it  is  the  best, 
we  are  driven  irresistibly  to  use  it.  And  how  strange  that 
some  of  us  can  find  no  better  use  for  it  than  to  destroy  its 


14  Mind  and  Body 

own  self !  Visit  one  of  the  Jesuit  fathers  and  hear  him  seek 
to  persuade  you  that  reason  is  powerless  against  faith  and 
must  abdicate  to  faith.  You  answer,  "Yes,  father,  you  have 
persuaded  me.  I  admit  the  fallibility  of  my  mortal  powers; 
and  I  begin  by  applying  my  doubts  of  them  to  the  arguments 
by  which  you  have  just  convinced  me.  I  was  convinced,  but 
of  course  I  cannot  be  sure  of  a  conviction,  attained  by  fallible 
reason.  Therefore  I  am  just  where  I  was  before — except  that 
I  am  no  longer  in  position  to  be  certain  of  anything." 

You  answer  in  good  faith,  and  take  up  your  hat  and  depart, 
closing  the  door  of  the  good  father's  study  behind  you.  But 
stop  a  moment,  why  do  you  close  the  door?  You  close  the 
door  because  your  reason  tells  you  that  otherwise  the  cold  air 
outside  will  blow  in  and  make  the  good  father  uncomfortable. 
You  put  your  hat  on,  because  your  reason  has  not  yet  been 
applied  to  the  problem  of  the  cause  of  baldness.  You  step  out 
onto  the  street,  and  when  you  hear  a  sudden  noise,  you  step 
back  onto  the  curbstone,  because  your  reason  tells  you  that 
an  automobile  is  coming,  and  that  on  the  sidewalk  you  are 
safe  from  it.  So  you  go  on,  using  your  reason  in  a  million 
acts  of  your  life  whereby  your  life  is  preserved  and  developed. 
And  if  anybody  suggested  that  the  fallibility  of  your  reason 
should  cause  you  to  delay  in  front  of  an  automobile,  you  would 
apply  your  reason  to  the  problem  of  that  person  and  decide 
that  he  was  insane.  And  I  say  that  just  as  there  is  insanity  in 
everyday  judgments  and  relationships,  so  there  is  insanity  in 
philosophy,  metaphysics  and  religion;  the  seed  and  source  of 
all  this  kind  of  insanity  being  the  notion  that  it  is  the  duty 
of  anybody  to  believe  anything  which  cannot  completely  justify 
itself  as  reasonable. 

Nowadays,  as  ideas  are  spreading,  the  champions  of  dogma 
are  hard  put  to  it,  and  you  will  find  their  minds  a  muddle  of 
two  points  of  view.  The  Jewish  rabbi  will  strive  desperately 
to  think  of  some  hygienic  objection  to  the  presence  of  meat 
and  butter  on  the  same  plate ;  the  Catholic  priest  will  tell  you 
that  fish  is  a  very  wholesome  article  of  food,  and  that  any- 
how we  all  eat  too  much ;  the  Methodist  and  the  Baptist  and 
the  Presbyterian  will  tell  you  that  if  men  did  not  rest  one  day 
in  seven  their  health  would  break  down.  Thus  they  justify 
faith  by  reason,  and  reconcile  the  conflict  between  science  and 
theology.  Accepting  this  method,  I  experiment  and  learn  that 
it  improves  my  digestion  and  adds  to  my  working  power  if  I 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  15 

play  tennis  on  Sunday.  I  follow  this  indisputably  rational 
form  of  conduct — and  find  myself  in  conflict  with  the  "faith" 
of  the  ancient  State  of  Delaware,  which  obliges  me  to  serve  a 
term  in  its  state's  prison  for  having  innocently  and  unwittingly 
desecrated  its  day  of  holiness ! 

If  you  read  Professor  Bury's  little  book,  "A  History  of 
Freedom  of  Thought,"  you  will  discover  that  there  has  been 
a  long  conflict  over  the  right  of  men  to  use  their  minds — 
and  the  victory  is  not  yet.  The  term  "free  thinker,"  which 
ought  to  be  the  highest  badge  a  man  could  wear,  is  still  almost 
everywhere  throughout  America  a  term  of  vague  terror.  In 
the  State  of  California  today  there  is  a  Criminal  Syndicalism 
Act,  which  provides  a  maximum  of  fourteen  years  in  jail  for 
any  person  who  shall  write  or  publish  or  speak  any  words 
expressive  of  the  idea  that  the  United  States  government 
should  be  overthrown  in  the  same  way  that  it  was  established — 
that  is,  by  force;  only  a  few  months  ago  the  writer  of  this 
book  was  on  the  witness  stand  for  two  days,  and  had  the  pain- 
ful, almost  incredible  experience  of  being  battered  and  knocked 
about  by  an  inquisitive  district  attorney,  who  cross-examined 
him  as  to  every  detail  of  his  beliefs,  and  read  garbled  extracts 
from  his  published  writings,  in  the  effort  to  make  it  appear 
that  he  held  some  belief  which  might  possibly  prejudice  the 
jury  against  him.  The  defendant  in  this  case,  a  returned 
soldier  who  had  spent  three  years  as  a  volunteer  in  the  trenches, 
and  had  been  twice  wounded  and  once  gassed,  was  accused, 
not  merely  of  approving  the  Soviet  form  of  government,  but 
also  of  having  printed  uncomplimentary  references  to  priests 
and  religious  institutions. 

Nowadays  it  is  the  propertied  class  which  has  taken  pos- 
session of  the  powers  of  government,  and  which  presimies 
to  censor  the  thinking  of  mankind  in  its  own  interest.  But 
whether  it  be  priestcraft  or  whether  it  be  capitalism  which 
seeks  to  bind  the  human  mind,  it  comes  to  the  same  thing, 
and  the  effort  must  be  met  by  the  assertion  that,  in  spite  of 
errors  and  blunders,  and  the  serious  harm  these  may  do,  there 
is  no  wa:y  for  men  to  advance  save  by  using  the  best  powers 
of  thinking  they  possess,  and  proclaiming  their  conclusions  to 
others.  Speaking  theologically  for  the  moment,  God  has  given 
us  our  reasoning  powers,  and  also  the  impulse  to  use  them, 
and  it  is  inconceivable  that  He  should  seek  to  restrict  their 
use,  or  should  give  to  anyone  the  power  to  forbid  their  use. 


16  Mind  and  Body 

It  is  His  truth  which  we  seek,  and  His  which  we  proclaim. 
In  so  doing  we  perform  our  highest  act  of  faith,  and  we  re- 
fuse to  be  troubled  by  the  idea  that  for  this  service  He  will 
reward  us  by  an  eternity  of  sulphur  and  brimstone. 

Throughout  the  remainder  of  this  book  it  will  be  assumed 
that  the  reader  accepts  this  point  of  view,  or,  at  any  rate,  that 
he  is  willing  for  purposes  of  experiment  to  give  it  a  trial 
and  see  where  it  leads  him.  We  shall  proceed  to  consider  the 
problems  of  human  life  in  the  light  of  reason,  to  determine 
how  they  come  to  be,  and  how  they  can  be  solved. 


CHAPTER  IV 
THE  ORIGIN  OF  MORALITY 

(Compares  the  ways  of  nature  with  human  morality,  and  tries 
to  show  how  the  latter  came  to  be.) 

Seventy  years  ago  Charles  Darwin  published  his  book, 
"The  Origin  of  Species,"  in  which  he  defied  the  theological 
dogma  of  his  time  by  the  shocking  idea  that  life  had  evolved 
by  many  stages  of  progress  from  the  diatom  to  man.  This 
of  course  did  not  conform  to  the  story  of  the  Garden  of  Eden, 
and  so  "Darwinism"  was  fought  as  an  invention  of  the  devil, 
and  in  the  interior  of  America  there  are  numerous  sectarian 
colleges  where  the  dread  term  "evolution"  is  spoken  in  awed 
whispers.  Only  the  other  day  I  read  in  my  newspaper  the 
triumphant  proclamation  of  some  clergyman  that  "Darwinism" 
had  been  overthrown.  This  reverend  gentleman  had  got  mixed 
up  because  some  biologists  were  disputing  some  detail  of  the 
method  by  which  the  evolution  of  species  had  been  brought 
about.  Do  species  change  by  the  gradual  elimination  of  the 
unfit,  or  do  they  change  by  sudden  leaps,  the  "mutation"  theory 
of  de  Vries?  Are  acquired  powers  transmitted  to  posterity, 
or  is  the  germ  plasm  unaffected  by  its  environment  ?  Concern- 
ing such  questions  the  scientists  debate.  But  the  fact  that  life 
has  evolved  in  an  ordered  series  from  the  lower  forms  to  the 
higher,  and  that  each  individual  reproduces  in  embryo  and  in 
infancy  the  history  of  this  long  process — ^these  facts  are  now 
the  basis  of  all  modern  thinking,  and  as  generally  accepted 
as  the  rotation  of  the  earth. 

You  may  study  this  process  of  evolution  from  the  outside, 
in  the  multitude  of  forms  which  it  has  assumed  and  in  their 
reactions  one  to  another ;  or  you  may  study  it  from  the  inside 
in  your  own  soul,  the  emotions  which  accompany  it,  the  im- 
pulse or  craving  which  impels  it,  the  elan  vital,  as  it  is  called 
by  the  French  philosopher  Bergson,  The  Christians  call  it 
love,  and  Nietzsche,  who  hated  Christianity,  called  it  "the 
will  to  power,"  and  persuaded  himself  that  it  was  the  opposite 
of  love. 

You  will  find  in  the  essays  of  Professor  Huxley,  one  en- 

17 


18  Mind  and  Body 

titled  "Evolution  and  Ethics,"  in  which  he  sets  forth  the  com- 
plete unmorality  of  nature,  and  declares  that  there  is  no  way 
by  which  what  mankind  knows  as  morality  can  have  originated 
in  the  process  of  nature  or  can  be  reconciled  to  natural  law. 
This  statement,  coming  from  a  leading  agnostic,  was  welcome 
to  the  theologians.  But  when  I  first  read  the  essay,  as  a  student 
of  sixteen,  it  seemed  to  me  narrow ;  I  thought  I  saw  a  stand- 
point from  which  the  contradiction  disappeared.  The  differ- 
ence between  the  morality  of  Christ  and  the  morality  of 
nature  is  merely  the  difference  between  a  lower  and  a  higher 
stage  of  mental  development.  The  animal  loves  and  seeks  by 
instinct  to  preserve  the  life  which  it  knows — that  is  to  say, 
its  own  life  and  the  life  of  its  young.  The  wolf  knows  noth- 
ing about  the  feelings  of  a  deer ;  but  man  in  his  savage  state 
develops  reasoning  powers  enough  to  realize  that  there  are 
others  like  himself,  the  members  of  his  own  tribe,  and  he 
makes  for  himself  taboos  which  forbid  him  to  kill  and  eat 
the  members  of  that  tribe.  At  the  present  time  humanity  has 
developed  its  reason  and  imaginative  sympathy  to  include  in 
the  "tribe"  one  or  two  hundred  million  people ;  while  to  those 
outside  the  tribe  it  still  preserves  the  attitude  of  the  wolf. 

How  came  it  that  a  mind  so  acute  as  Huxley's  went  so 
far  astray  on  the  question  of  the  evolution  of  morality?  The 
answer  is  that  this  was  the  factory  age  in  England,  and  the 
great  scientist,  a  rebel  in  theological  matters,  was  in  economics 
a  child  of  his  time.  We  find  him  using  the  formulas  of 
bourgeois  biology  to  ridicule  Henry  George  and  his  plea  for 
the  freeing  of  the  land.  "Competition  is  the  life  of  trade," 
ran  the  nineteenth  century  slogan;  and  competition  was  the 
god  of  nineteenth  century  biology.  Tennyson  summed  it  up 
in  the  phrase:  "Nature  red  in  tooth  and  claw  with  ravin;" 
and  this  was  found  convenient  by  Manchester  manufacturers 
who  wished  to  shut  little  children  up  for  fourteen  hours  a 
day  in  cotton  mills,  and  to  harness  women  to  drag  cars  in  the 
coal  mines,  and  to  be  told  by  the  learned  men  of  their  colleges 
and  the  holy  men  of  their  churches  that  this  was  "the  survival 
of  the  fittest,"  it  was  nature's  way  of  securing  the  advance- 
ment of  the  race. 

But  now  we  are  preparing  for  an  era  of  cooperation,  and 
it  occurs  to  our  men  of  science  to  go  back  to  nature  and  find 
out  what  really  are  her  ways.  H  you  will  read  Kropotkin's 
"Mutual  Aid  as  a  Factor  in  Evolution,"  you  will  find  a  com- 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  19 

plete  refutation  of  the  old  bourgeois  biology,  and  a  view  of 
nature  which  reveals  in  it  the  germs  of  human  morality. 
Kropotkin  points  out  that  everywhere  throughout  nature  it 
is  the  social  and  not  the  solitary  animals  which  are  most 
numerous  and  most  successful.  There  are  many  millions  of 
ants  and  bees  for  every  hawk  or  eagle,  and  certainly  in  the 
state  of  nature  there  were  thousands  of  deer  for  every  lion 
or  tiger  that  preyed  upon  them.  And  all  these  social  creatures 
have  their  ways  of  being,  which  it  requires  no  stress  of  the 
imagination  to  compare  with  the  tribal  customs  and  the  moral 
codes  of  mankind.  The  different  animals  prey  upon  one  an- 
other, but  they  do  not  prey  upon  their  own  species,  except  in 
a  few  rare  cases.  The  only  beast  that  makes  a  regular  prac- 
tice of  exploiting  his  own  kind  is  man. 

By  hundreds  of  interesting  illustrations  Kropotkin  shows 
that  mutual  aid  and  mutual  self-protection  are  the  means 
whereby  the  higher  forms  of  being  have  been  evolved.  In- 
sects and  birds  and  fish,  nearly  all  the  herbivorous  mammals, 
and  even  a  great  many  of  the  carnivores,  help  one  another 
and  protect  one  another.  The  chattering  monkeys  in  the  tree- 
tops  drove  out  the  saber-tooth  tiger  from  the  grove  because 
there  were  so  many  of  them,  and  when  they  saw  him  they 
all  set  up  a  shriek  and  clamor  which  deafened  and  confused 
him.  And  when  by  and  by  these  monkeys  developed  an 
opposed  thumb,  and  broke  off  a  branch  of  a  tree  for  a  club, 
and  fastened  a  sharp  stone  on  the  end  of  it  for  an  axe,  and 
fell  upon  the  saber-toothed  tiger  and  exterminated  him,  they 
did  it  because  they  had  learned  solidarity — even  as  the  workers 
of  the  world  are  today  learning  solidarity  in  the  face  of  the 
beast  of  capitalism. 

Man  has  survived  by  the  cunning  of  his  brain,  we  are  told, 
and  that  is  true.  But  first  among  the  products  of  that  cunning 
brain  has  been  the  knowledge  that  by  himsdlf  he  is  the  most 
helpless  and  pitiful  of  creatures,  while  standing  together  and 
forming  societies  and  developing  moralities,  he  is  master  of 
the  world.  He  has  not  yet  learned  that  lesson  entirely;  he 
has  learned  it  only  for  his  own  nation.  Therefore  he  takes 
the  highest  skill  of  his  hand  and  the  subtlest  wit  of  his  brain, 
and  uses  them  to  manufacture  poison  gases.  At  the  present 
hour  he  is  painfully  realizing  that  his  poison  formulas  all 
become  known  to  the  tribes  whom  he  calls  his  enemies,  and 
so  it  is  his  own  destruction  he  is  engaged  in  contriving.     In 


20  Mind  and  Body 

other  words,  man  has  come  to  a  time  when  his  mechanical  skill, 
his  mastery  over  the  forces  of  nature,  has  developed  more 
rapidly  than  his  moral  sense  and  his  imaginative  sympathy. 
His  ability  to  destroy  life  has  become  dangerously  greater  than 
his  desire  to  preserve  it.  So  he  confronts  the  fair  face  of 
nature  as  an  insane  creature,  wrecking  not  merely  everything 
that  he  himself  has  built  up,  but  everything  that  nature  has 
built  in  the  ages  before  him.  He  is  striving  now  with  infinite 
agony  to  make  this  fact  real  to  himself,  and  to  mend  his 
evil  ways ;  and  the  first  step  in  that  process  is  to  root  out  from 
his  mind  the  devil's  doctrine  which  in  his  blindness  and  greed 
he  has  himself  implanted,  that  there  is  any  way  for  him  to  find 
real  happiness,  or  to  make  any  worth  while  progress  on  this 
earth,  by  the  method  of  inflicting  misery  and  torment  upon 
his  fellow  men. 


CHAPTER  V 
NATURE  AND  MAN 

(Attempts  to  show  how  man  has  taken  control  of  nature,  and 
is  carrying  on  her  processes  and  improving  upon  them.) 

If  the  argument  of  the  preceding  chapter  is  sound,  human 
morality  is  not  a  fixed  and  eternal  set  of  laws,  but  is,  like 
everything  else  in  the  world,  a  product  of  natural  evolution. 
We  can  trace  the  history  of  it,  just  as  we  trace  the  story  of 
the  rocks.  It  is  not  a  mysterious  or  supernatural  thing,  it  is 
simply  the  reaction  of  man  to  his  environment,  and  more 
especially  to  his  fellow  men.  The  source  of  it  is  that  same 
inner  impulse,  that  love  of  life,  that  joy  in  growing,  that  faith 
which  appears  to  be  the  soul  of  all  being. 

Man  is  a  part  of  nature  and  a  product  of  nature ;  in  many 
fundamental  respects  his  ways  are  still  nature's  ways  and  his 
laws  still  nature's  laws.  But  there  are  other  and  even  more 
significant  ways  in  which  man  has  separated  himself  from 
nature  and  made  himself  something  quite  different.  In  order 
to  reveal  this  clearly,  we  draw  a  distinction  between  nature 
and  man.  This  is  a  proper  thing  to  do,  provided  we  bear  in 
mind  that  our  classification  is  not  permanent  or  final.  We 
distinguish  frogs  from  tadpoles,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  at 
one  stage  the  creature  is  half  tadpole  and  half  frog.  We 
distinguish  the  animal  from  the  vegetable  kingdom,  despite 
the  fact  that  in  their  lower  forms  they  cannot  be  distinguished. 

What,  precisely,  is  the  difference  between  nature  and  man  ? 
The  difference  lies  in  the  fact  that  nature  is  apparently  blind 
in  her  processes ;  she  produces  a  million  eggs  in  order  to  give 
life  to  one  salmon,  she  produces  countless  millions  of  salmon 
to  be  devoured  by  other  fish  apparently  no  better  than  salmon. 
Poets  may  take  up  the  doctrine  of  evolution  and  dress  it  out  in 
theological  garments,  talking  about  the  "one  far  off  divine  event 
towards  which  the  whole  creation  moves,"  but  for  all  we  can 
see,  nature,  apart  from  man,  is  just  as  well  satisfied  to  move 
in  circles,  and  to  come  back  exactly  where  she  started.  Nature 
made  a  whole  world  of  complicated  creatures  in  the  steamy, 
luke-warm  swamps  of  the  Mesozoic  era,  and  then,  as  if  decid- 

21 


22  Mind  and  Body 

ing  that  the  pattern  of  a  large  body  and  a  small  brain  was  not 
a  success,  she  froze  them  all  to  death  with  a  glacial  epoch, 
and  we  have  nothing  but  the  bones  to  tell  us  about  them. 

No  one  understands  anything  about  evolution  until  he  has 
realized  that  the  phrase  "the  survival  of  the  fittest"  does  not 
mean  the  survival  of  the  best  from  any  human  point  of  view. 
It  merely  means  the  survival  of  those  capable  of  surviving 
in  some  particular  environment.  We  consider  our  present 
civilization  as  "fit";  but  if  astronomical  changes  should  cause 
another  ice  age,  we  should  discover  that  our  "fitness"  de- 
pended upon  our  ability  to  live  on  lichens,  or  on  something 
we  could  grow  by  artificial  light  in  the  bowels  of  the  earth. 

So  much  for  our  ancient  mother,  nature.  But  now — 
whether  we  say  with  the  theologians  that  it  was  divine  provi- 
dence, or  with  the  materialist  philosophers  that  it  was  an 
accidental  mixing  of  atoms — at  any  rate  it  has  come  about  that 
nature  has  recently  produced  creatures  who  are  conscious  of 
her  process,  who  are  able  to  observe  and  criticize  it,  to  take 
up  her  work  and  carry  it  on  in  their  own  way,  for  better  or 
for  worse.  Whether  by  accident  or  design,  there  has  been 
on  parts  of  our  planet  such  a  combination  of  climate  and  soil 
as  has  brought  into  being  a  new  product  of  nature,  a  heightened 
form  of  life  which  we  call  "intelligence."  Creation  opens  its 
eyes,  and  beholds  the  work  of  the  creator,  and  decides  that 
it  is  good — yet  not  so  good  as  it  might  be!  Creation  takes 
up  the  work  of  the  creator,  and  continues  it,  in  many  respects 
annulling  it,  in  other  respects  revising  it  entirely.  Whether 
a  sonnet  is  a  better  or  a  higher  product  than  a  spider  is  a 
question  it  would  be  futile  to  discuss ;  but  this,  at  least,  should 
be  clear — nature  has  produced  an  infinity  of  spiders,  but  nature 
never  produced  a  sonnet,  nor  anything  resembling  it. 

Man,  the  creature  of  God,  takes  over  the  functions  of  God. 
This  fact  may  shock  us,  or  it  may  inspire  us;  to  the  meta- 
physically minded  it  offers  a  great  variety  of  fascinating  prob- 
lems. Can  it  be  that  God  is  in  process  of  becoming,  that  there 
is  no  God  until  he  has  become,  in  us  and  through  us?  H.  G. 
Wells  sets  forth  this  curious  idea;  and  then,  of  course,  the 
bishops  and  the  clergy  rise  up  in  indignation  and  denounce 
Mr.  Wells  as  an  upstart  and  trespasser  upon  their  field.  They 
have  been  worshiping  their  God  for  some  three  or  four  thou- 
sand years,  and  know  that  He  has  been  from  eternity;  He 
created  the  world  at  His  will,  and  how  shall  impious  man 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  23 

presume  to  rise  up  and  criticize  His  product,  and  imagine 
that  he  can  improve  upon  it?  Man,  with  his  cheap  and  silly 
little  toys,  his  sonnets  and  scientific  systems,  his  symphony 
concerts  and  such  pale  imitations  of  celestial  harmonies! 

Mr.  Wells,  in  his  character  of  God  in  the  making,  has 
created  a  bishop  of  his  own,  and  no  doubt  would  maintain 
the  thesis  that  he  is  a  far  better  bishop  than  any  created  by 
the  God  of  the  Anglican  churches.  We  will  leave  Mr.  Wells' 
bishop  to  argue  these  problems  with  God's  bishops,  and  will 
merely  remind  the  reader  of  our  warning  about  these  meta- 
physical matters.  You  can  prove  anything  and  everything, 
whichever  and  however,  all  or  both;  and  discussions  of  the 
subject  are  merely  your  enunciation  of  the  fact  that  you  have 
your  private  truth  as  you  want  it.  It  may  be  that  there  is 
an  Infinite  Consciousness,  which  carries  the  whole  process  of 
creation  in  itself,  and  that  all  the  seeming  wastes  and  blunders 
of  nature  can  be  explained  from  some  point  of  view  at  present 
beyond  the  reach  of  our  minds.  On  the  other  hand  it  may 
be  that  consciousness  is  now  dawning  in  the  universe  for  the 
first  time.  It  may  be  that  it  is  an  accident,  a  fleeting  product 
like  the  morning  mist  on  the  mountain  top.  On  the  other 
hand,  it  may  be  that  it  is  destined  to  grow  and  expand  and 
take  control  of  the  entire  universe,  as  a  farmer  takes  control 
of  a  field  for  his  own  purposes.  It  may  be  that  just  as  our 
individual  fragments  of  intelligence  communicate  and  merge 
into  a  family,  a  club,  a  nation,  a  world  culture,  so  we  shall 
some  day  grope  our  way  toward  the  consciousness  of  other 
planets,  or  of  other  states  of  being  subsisting  on  this  planet 
unknown  to  us,  or  perhaps  even  toward  the  cosmic  soul,  the 
universal  consciousness  which  we  call  God. 

But  meantime,  all  we  can  say  with  positiveness  is  this: 
man,  the  created,  is  becoming  the  creator.  He  is  taking  up 
the  world  purpose,  he  is  imposing  upon  it  new  purposes  of  his 
own,  he  is  attempting  to  impose  upon  it  a  moral  code,  to  test 
it  and  discipline  it  by  a  new  standard  which  he  calls  economy. 
To  the  present  writer  this  seems  the  most  significant  fact 
about  life,  the  most  fascinating  point  of  view  from  which  life 
can  be  regarded.  The  reader  who  wishes  to  follow  it  into 
greater  detail  is  referred  to  a  little  book  by  Professor  E.  Ray 
Lankester,  "The  KingdonL  of  Man" ;  especially  the  opening 
essay,  with  its  fascinating  title,  "Nature's  Insurgent  Son." 

In  what  ways  have  the  reasoned  and  deliberate  purposes  of 


24  Mind  and  Body 

man  revised  and  even  supplanted  the  processes  of  nature? 
The  ways  are  so  many  that  it  would  be  easier  to  mention 
those  in  which  he  has  not  done  so,  A  modern  civilized  man 
is  hardly  content  with  anything  that  nature  does,  nor  willing 
to  accept  any  of  nature's  products.  He  will  not  eat  nature's 
fruits,  he  prefers  the  kinds  that  he  himself  has  brought  into 
being.  He  is  not  content  with  the  skin  that  nature  has  given 
him;  he  has  made  himself  an  infinite  variety  of  complicated 
coverings.  He  objects  to  nature's  habit  of  pouring  cold 
water  upon  him,  and  so  he  has  built  himself  houses  in  which 
he  makes  his  own  climate;  he  has  recently  taken  to  creat- 
ing for  himself  houses  which  roll  along  the  ground,  or  which 
fly  through  the  air,  or  which  swim  under  the  surface  of 
the  sea;  so  he  carries  his  private  climate  with  him  to  all 
these  places.  It  was  nature's  custom  to  remove  her  blunders 
and  her  experiments  quickly  from  her  sight.  But  man  has 
decided  that  he  loves  life  so  well  that  he  will  preserve 
even  the  imbeciles,  the  lame  and  the  halt  and  the  blind.  In  a 
state  of  nature,  if  a  man's  eyes  were  not  properly  focused, 
he  blundered  into  the  lair  of  a  tiger  and  was  eaten.  But 
civilized  man  despises  such  a  method  of  maintaining  the 
standard  of  human  eyes ;  he  creates  for  himself  a  transparent 
product,  ground  to  such  a  curve  that  it  corrects  the  focus  of 
his  eyes,  and  makes  them  as  good  as  any  other  eyes.  In  ten 
thousand  such  ways  we  might  name,  man  has  rebelled  against 
the  harshness  of  his  ancient  mother,  and  has  freed  himself 
from  her  control. 

But  still  he  is  the  child  of  his  mother,  and  so  it  is  his  way 
to  act  first,  and  then  to  realize  what  he  has  done.  So  it  comes 
about  that  very  few,  even  of  the  most  highly  educated  men, 
are  aware  how  completely  the  ancient  ways  of  nature  have 
been  suppressed  by  her  "insurgent  son."  It  is  a  good  deal 
as  in  the  various  trades  and  professions  which  have  developed 
with  such  amazing  rapidity  in  modern  civilization;  the  paper 
man  knows  how  to  make  paper,  the  shoe  man  knows  how  to 
make  shoes,  the  optician  knows  about  grinding  glasses,  but 
none  of  these  knows  very  much  about  the  others'  specialties, 
and  has  no  realization  of  how  far  the  other  has  gone.  So  it 
comes  about  that  in  our  colleges  we  are  still  teaching  ancient 
and  immutable  "laws  of  nature,"  which  in  the  actual  practice 
of  men  at  work  are  as  extinct  and  forgotten  as  the  dodo. 
In  all  colleges,  except  a  few  which  have  been  tainted  by 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  25 

Socialist  thought,  the  students  are  solemnly  learning  the  so- 
called  "Malthusian  law,"  that  population  presses  continually 
upon  the  limits  of  subsistence,  there  are  always  a  few  more 
people  in  every  part  of  the  world  than  that  part  of  the  world 
is  able  to  maintain.  At  any  time  we  increase  the  world's  pro- 
ductive powers,  population  will  increase  correspondingly,  so 
there  can  never  be  an  end  to  human  misery,  and  abortion, 
war  and  famine  are  simply  nature's  eternal  methods  of  adjust- 
ing man  to  his  environment. 

Thus  solemnly  we  are  taught  in  the  colleges.  And  yet,  nine 
out  of  ten  of  the  students  come  from  homes  where  the  parents 
have  discovered  the  modern  practice  of  birth  control;  all  the 
students  are  themselves  finding  out  about  it  in  one  way  or 
another,  and  will  proceed  when  they  marry  to  restrict  them- 
selves to  two  or  three  children.  In  vain  will  the  ghost  of 
their  favorite  statesman  and  hero,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  be 
traveling  up  and  down  the  land,  denoimcing  them  for  the 
dreadful  crime  of  "race  suicide" — ^that  is  to  say,  their  pre- 
suming to  use  their  reason  to  put  an  end  to  the  ghastly  situa- 
tion revealed  by  the  Malthusian  law,  over-population  eternally 
recurring  and  checked  by  abortion,  war  and  famine !  In  vain 
will  the  ghost  of  their  favorite  saint  and  moralist,  Anthony 
Comstock,  be  traveling  up  and  down  the  land,  putting  people 
in  jail  for  daring  to  teach  to  poor  women  what  every  rich 
woman  knows,  and  for  attempting  to  change  the  entirely  man- 
made  state  of  affairs  whereby  an  intelligent  and  self-governing 
Anglo-Saxon  land  is  being  in  two  or  three  generations  turned 
over  to  a  slum  population  of  Italians,  Poles,  Hungarians, 
Portuguese,  French-Canadians,  Mexicans  and  Japanese ! 

Likewise  in  every  orthodox  college  the  student  is  taught 
what  his  professors  are  pleaded  to  call  "the  law  of  diminishing 
returns  of  agriculture."  That  is  to  say,  additional  labor  ex- 
pended upon  a  plot  of  land  does  not  result  in  an  equal  increase 
of  produce,  and  the  increase  grows  less,  until  finally  you  come 
to  a  time  when  no  matter  how  much  labor  you  expend,  you 
can  get  no  more  produce  from  that  plot  of  land.  All  pro- 
fessors teach  this,  because  fifty  years  ago  it  was  true,  and 
since  that  time  it  has  not  occurred  to  any  professor  of  political 
science  to  visit  a  farm.  And  all  the  while,  out  in  the  suburbs 
of  the  city  where  the  college  is  located,  market  gardeners  are 
practicing  on  an  enormous  scale  a  new  system  of  intensive 
agriculture  which  makes  the  "law  of  diminishing  returns"  a 
foolish  joke. 


26  Mind  and  Body 

As  Kropotkin  shows  in  his  book,  "Fields,  Factories  and 
Workshops,"  the  modern  intensive  gardener,  by  use  of  glass 
and  the  chemical  test-tube,  has  developed  an  entirely  new 
science  of  plant  raising.  He  is  independent  of  climate,  he 
makes  his  own  climate;  he  is  independent  of  the  defects  of 
the  soil,  he  would  just  as  soon  start  from  nothing  and  make 
his  soil  upon  an  asphalt  pavement.  By  doubling  his  capital 
investment  he  raises,  not  twice  as  much  produce,  but  ten 
times  as  much.  If  his  methods  were  applied  to  the  British 
Isles,  he  could  raise  sufficient  produce  on  this  small  surface 
to  feed  the  population  of  the  entire  globe. 

So  we  see  that  by  simple  and  entirely  harmless  devices 
man  is  in  position  to  restrict  or  to  increase  population  as  he 
sees  fit.  Also  he  is  in  position  to  raise  food  and  produce  the 
necessities  of  life  for  a  hundred  or  thousand  times  as  many 
people  as  are  now  on  the  earth.  But  superstition  ordains  in- 
volimtary  parenthood,  and  capitalism  ordains  that  land  shall 
be  held  out  of  use  for  speculation,  or  shall  be  exploited  for 
rent!  And  this  is  done  in  the  name  of  "nature" — ^that  old 
nature  of  the  "tooth  and  claw,"  whose  ancient  plan  it  is  "that 
they  shall  take  who  have  the  power,  and  they  shall  keep  who 
can" ;  that  ancient  nature  which  has  been  so  entirely  suppressed 
and  supplanted  by  civilized  man,  and  which  survives  only  as 
a  ghost,  a  skeleton  to  be  resurrected  from  the  tomb,  for  the 
purpose  of  frightening  the  enslaved.  When  a  predatory 
financier  wishes  a  fur  overcoat  to  protect  himself  from  the 
cold,  or  when  he  hires  a  masseur  to  keep  up  the  circulation 
of  his  blood,  you  do  not  find  him  troubling  himself  about  the 
laws  of  "nature";  never  will  he  mention  this  old  scarecrow, 
except  when  he  is  trying  to  piersuade  the  workers  of  the  world 
to  go  on  paying  him  tribute  for  the  use  of  the  natural  resources 
of  the  earth! 


CHAPTER  VI 
MAN  THE  REBEL 

(Shows  the  transition  stage  between  instinct  and  reason,  in 
which  man  finds  himself,  and  how  he  can  advance  to  a  securer 
condition.) 

In  the  state  of  nature  you  find  every  creature  living  a 
precarious  existence,  incessantly  beset  by  enemies;  and  the 
creature  survives  only  so  long  as  it  keeps  itself  at  the  top  of 
its  form.  The  result  is  the  maintenance  of  the  type  in  its 
full  perfection,  and,  under  the  competitive  pressure,  a  gradual 
increase  of  its  powers.  Excepting  when  sudden  eruptions  of 
natural  forces  occur,  every  creature  is  perfectly  provided  with 
a  set  of  instincts  for  all  emergencies ;  it  is  in  harmonious  rela- 
tionship to  its  environment,  it  knows  how  to  do  what  it  has 
to  do,  and  even  its  fears  and  its  pains  serve  for  its  protection. 
But  now  comes  man  and  overthrows  this  state  of  nature, 
abolishes  the  competitive  struggle,  and  changes  at  his  own 
insolent  will  both  his  environment  and  his  reaction  thereto. 

Man's  changes  are,  in  the  beginning,  all  along  one  line; 
they  are  for  his  own  greater  comfort,  the  avoidance  of  the 
inconveniences  of  nature  and  the  stresses  of  the  competitive 
struggle.  In  a  state  of  nature  there  are  no  fat  animals,  but  in 
civilization  there  are  not  merely  fat  animals,  but  fat  men  to 
eat  the  fat  animals.  In  a  state  of  nature  no  animal  loafs  very 
long;  it  has  to  go  out  and  hunt  its  food  again.  But  man,  by 
his  superior  cunning,  compels  the  animals  to  work  for  him, 
and  also  his  fellow  men.  So  he  produces  unlimited  wealth 
for  himself ;  not  merely  can  he  eat  and  drink  and  sleep  all  he 
wants,  but  he  builds  a  whole  elaborate  set  of  laws  and  moral 
customs  and  religious  codes  about  this  power,  he  invents  man- 
ners and  customs  and  literatures  and  arts,  expressive  of  his 
superiority  to  nature  and  to  his  fellow  men,  and  of  his  ability 
to  enslave  and  exploit  them.  So  he  destroys  for  his  imperious 
self  the  beneficent  guardianship  which  nature  had  maintained 
over  him ;  he  develops  a  thousand  complicated  diseases,  a  thou- 
sand monstrous  abnormalities  of  body  and  mind  and  spirit. 
And  each  one  of  these  diseases  and  abnormalities  is  a  new 

27 


28  Mind  and  Body 

life  of  its  own;  it  develops  a  body  of  knowledge,  a  science, 
and  perhaps  an  art ;  it  becomes  the  means  of  life,  the  environ- 
ment and  the  determining  destiny  of  thousands,  perhaps  mil- 
lions, of  human  beings.  So  continues  the  growth  of  the  colossal 
structure  which  we  call  civilization — in  part  still  healthy  and 
progressive,  but  in  part  as  foul  and  deadly  as  a  gigantic  cancer. 

What  is  to  be  done  about  this  cancer  ?  First  of  all,  it  must 
be  diagnosed,  the  extent  of  it  precisely  mapped  out  and  the 
causes  of  it  determined.  Man,  the  rebel,  has  rejected  his 
mother  nature,  and  has  lost  and  for  the  most  part  forgotten 
the  instincts  with  which  she  provided  him.  He  has  destroyed 
the  environment  which,  however  harsh  to  the  individual,  was 
beneficent  to  the  race,  and  has  set  up  in  the  place  of  it  a 
gigantic  pleasure-house,  with  talking  machines  and  moving 
pictures  and  soda  fountains  and  manicure  parlors  and  "gents' 
furnishing  establishments." 

Shall  we  say  that  man  is  to  go  back  to  a  state  of  nature, 
that  he  shall  no  longer  make  asylums  for  the  insane  and 
homes  for  the  defective,  eye-glasses  for  the  astigmatic  and 
malted  milk  for  the  dyspeptic?  There  are  some  who  preach 
that.  Among  the  multitude  of  strange  books  and  pamphlets 
which  come  in  my  mail,  I  found  the  other  day  a  volume  from 
England,  "Social  Chaos  and  the  Way  Out,"  by  Alfred  Baker 
Read,  a  learned  and  imposing  tome  of  364  pages,  wherein 
with  all  the  paraphernalia  of  learning  it  is  gravely  maintained 
that  the  solution  for  the  ills  of  civilization  is  a  return  to  the 
ancient  Greek  practice  of  infanticide.  Every  child  at  birth  is 
to  be  examined  by  a  committee  of  physicians,  and  if  it  is 
found  to  possess  any  defect,  or  if  the  census  has  established 
that  there  are  enough  babies  in  the  world  for  the  present,  this 
baby  shall  be  mercifully  and  painlessly  asphyxiated.  You 
might  think  that  this  is  a  joke,  after  the  fashion  of  Swift's 
proposal  for  eating  the  children  of  famine-stricken  Ireland. 
I  have  spent  some  time  examining  this  book  before  I  risk 
committing  myself  to  the  statement  that  it  is  the  work  of  a 
sober  scientist,  with  no  idea  whatever  of  fun. 

If  we  are  going  to  think  clearly  on  this  subject,  the  first 
point  we  have  to  understand  is  that  nature  has  nothing  to  do 
with  it.  We  cannot  appeal  to  nature,  because  we  are  many 
thousands  of  years  beyond  her  sway.  We  left  her  when  the 
first  ape  came  down  from  the  treetop  and  fastened  a  sharp 
stone  in  the  end  of  his  club;  we  bade  irrevocable  good-bye 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  29 

to  her  when  the  first  man  kept  himself  from  freezing  and 
altered  his  diet  by  means  of  fire.  Therefore,  it  is  no  argu- 
ment to  say  that  this,  that,  or  the  other  remedy  is  "unnatural." 
Our  choice  will  lie  among  a  thousand  different  courses,  but 
the  one  thing  we  may  be  sure  of  is  that  none  of  them  will  be 
"natural."  Bairnsfather,  in  one  of  his  war  cartoons,  portrays 
a  British  officer  on  leave,  who  got  homesick  for  the  trenches 
and  went  out  into  the  garden  and  dug  himself  a  hole  in  the 
mud  and  sat  shivering  in  the  rain  all  night.  And  this  amuses 
us  vastly ;  but  we  should  be  even  more  amused  if  any  kind  of 
reformer,  physician,  moralist,  clergyman  or  legislator  should 
suggest  to  us  any  remedy  for  our  ills  that  was  really  "accord- 
ing to  nature." 

Civilized  man,  creature  of  art  and  of  knowledge,  has  no 
love  for  nature  except  as  an  object  for  the  play  of  his  fancy 
and  his  wit.  He  means  to  live  his  own  life,  he  means  to 
hold  himself  above  nature  with  all  his  powers.  Yet,  obviously, 
he  cannot  go  on  accumulating  diseases,  he  cannot  give  his  life- 
blood  to  the  making  of  a  cancer  while  his  own  proper  tissues 
starve.  He  must  somehow  divert  the  flow  of  his  energies, 
his  social  blood-stream,  so  to  speak,  from  the  cancer  to  the 
healthy  growth.  To  abandon  the  metaphor,  man  will  deter- 
mine by  the  use  of  his  reason  what  he  wishes  life  to  be;  he 
will  choose  the  highest  forms  of  it  to  which  he  can  attain. 
He  will  then,  by  the  deliberate  act  of  his  own  will,  devote 
his  energies  to  those  tasks;  he  will  make  for  himself  new 
laws,  new  moral  codes,  new  customs  and  ways  of  thought, 
calculated  to  bring  to  reality  the  ideal  which  he  has  formed. 
So  only  can  man  justify  himself  as  a  creator,  so  can  he  realize 
the  benefit  and  escape  the  penalties  of  his  revolt  from  his 
ancient  mother. 

And  then,  perhaps,  we  shall  make  the  discovery  that  we 
have  come  back  to  nature,  only  in  a  new  form.  Nature, 
harsh  and  cruel,  wasteful  and  blind  as  we  call  her,  yet  had  her 
deep  wisdom;  she  cared  for  the  species,  she  protected  and 
preserved  the  type.  Man,  in  his  new  pride  of  power,  has  in- 
vented a  philosophy  which  he  dignifies  by  the  name  of  "in- 
dividualism." He  lives  and  works  for  himself ;  he  chooses 
to  wear  silk  shirts,  and  to  break  the  speed  limit,  and  to  pin 
ribbons  and  crosses  on  his  chest.  Now  what  he  must  do  with 
his  new  morality,  if  he  wishes  to  save  himself  from  degenera- 
tion, is  to  manifest  the  wisdom  and  far  vision  of  the  old 


30  Mind  and  Body 

mother  whom  he  spurned,  and  to  say  to  himself,  deliberately, 
as  an  act  of  high  daring:  I  will  protect  the  species,  I  will 
preserve  the  type !  I  will  deny  myself  the  raptures  of  alcoholic 
intoxication,  because  it  damages  the  health  of  my  offspring ; 
I  will  deny  myself  the  amusement  of  sexual  promiscuity  for 
the  same  reason.  I  will  devise  imitations  of  the  chase  and 
of  battle  in  order  that  I  may  keep  my  physical  body  up  to  the 
best  standard  of  nature.  Because  I  understand  that  all  civilized 
life  is  based  upon  intelligence,  I  will  acquire  knowledge  and 
spread  it  among  my  fellow  men.  Because  I  perceive  that 
civilization  is  impossible  without  sympathy,  and  because  sym- 
pathy makes  it  impossible  for  me  to  be  happy  while  my  fellow 
men  are  ignorant  and  degraded,  therefore  I  dedicate  my  ener- 
gies to  the  extermination  of  poverty,  war,  parasitism  and  all 
forms  of  exploitation  of  man  by  his  fellows. 

Professor  William  James  is  the  author  of  an  excellent  essay 
entitled  "A  Moral  Equivalent  for  War."  He  sets  forth  the 
idea  that  men  have  loved  war  through  the  ages  because  it  has 
called  forth  their  highest  efforts,  has  made  them  more  fully 
aware  of  the  powers  of  their  being.  He  asks.  May  it  not  be 
possible  for  man,  of  his  own  free  impulse,  bom  of  his  love 
of  life  and  the  wonderful  potentialities  which  it  unfolds,  to 
invent  for  himself  a  discipline,  a  code  based,  not  upon  the 
destruction  of  other  men  and  their  enslavement,  but  upon 
cooperative  emulation  in  the  unfoldment  of  the  powers  of  the 
mind?  That  this  can  be  done  by  men,  I  have  never  doubted. 
That  it  will  be  done,  and  done  quickly,  has  been  made  certain 
by  the  late  world  conflict,  which  has  demonstrated  to  all  think- 
ing people  that  the  progress  of  the  mechanical  arts  has  been 
such  that  man  is  now  able  to  inflict  upon  his  own  civilization 
more  damage  than  it  is  able  to  endure. 


CHAPTER  VII 
MAKING  OUR  MORALS 

(Attempts  to  show  that  human  morality  must  ckange  to  fit 
human  facts,  and  there  can  be  no  judge  of  it  save  human  reason.) 

Assuming  the  argument  of  the  preceding  chapters  to  be 
accepted,  it  appears  that  human  life  is  in  part  at  least  a 
product  of  human  will,  guided  by  human  intelligence.  Man 
finds  himself  in  the  position  of  the  crew  of  a  ship  in  the 
middle  cfi  the  ocean ;  Tie  does  not  know  exactly  how  the  ship 
was  made,  or  how  it  came  to  be  in  its  present  position,  but 
he  has  discovered  how  the  engines  are  run,  and  how  the  ship 
is  steered,  and  the  meaning  of  the  compass.  So  now  he  takes 
charge  of  the  ship,  and  keeps  it  afloat  amid  many  perils ;  and 
meantime,  on  the  bridge  of  the  vessel,  there  goes  on  a  furious 
argument  over  the  question  what  port  the  ship  shall  be  steered 
to  and  what  chart  shall  be  used. 

It  is  not  well  as  a  rule  to  trust  to  similes,  but  this  simile 
is  useful  because  it  helps  us  to  realize  how  fluid  and  changeable 
are  the  conditions  of  man's  life,  and  how  incessant  and  urgent 
the  problems  with  which  he  finds  himself  confronted.  The 
moral  and  legal  codes  of  mankind  may  be  compared  to  the 
steering  orders  which  are  given  to  the  helmsman  of  the  vessel. 
Northeast  by  north,  he  is  told ;  and  if  during  the  night  a  heavy 
wind  arises,  and  pushes  the  bow  of  the  vessel  off  to  starboard, 
then  the  helmsman  has  to  push  the  wheel  in  the  opposite  direc- 
tion. If  he  does  not  do  so,  he  may  find  that  his  vessel  has 
swung  around  and  is  going  to  some  other  part  of  the  world. 
Next  morning  the  passengers  may  wake  up  and  find  the  ship 
on  the  rocks — because  the  helmsman  persisted  in  following 
certain  steering  directions  which  were  laid  down  in  an  ancient 
Hebrew  book  two  or  three  thousand  years  ago ! 

If  life  is  a  continually  changing  product,  then  the  laws 
which  govern  conduct  must  also  be  continually  changing,  and 
morality  is  a  problem  of  continuous  adjustment  to  new  cir- 
cumstances and  new  needs.  If  man  is  free  to  work  upon  this 
changing  environment,  he  must  be  free  to  make  new  tools  and 
devise  new  processes.     If  it  is  the  task  of  reason  to  choose 

31 


32  Mind  and  Body 

among  many  possible  courses  and  many  possible  varieties  of 
life,  then  clearly  it  is  man's  duty  to  examine  and  revise  every 
detail  of  his  laws  and  customs  and  moral  codes. 

This  is,  of  course,  in  flat  contradiction  to  the  teachings  of 
all  religions.  So  far  as  I  know  there  is  no  religion  which 
does  not  teach  that  the  conduct  of  man  in  certain  matters  has 
been  eternally  fixed  by  some  higher  power,  and  that  it  is 
man's  duty  to  conform  to  these  rules.  It  is  considered  to  be 
wicked  even  to  suggest  any  other  idea;  in  fact,  to  do  so  is 
the  most  wicked  thing  in  the  world,  far  more  dangerous  than 
any  actual  infraction  of  the  code,  whatever  it  may  be. 

Let  us  see  how  this  works  out  in  practice.  Let  us  take, 
for  a  test,  the  Ten  Commandments.  These  commandments 
were  graven  upon  stone  tablets  some  four  thousand  years  ago, 
and  are  supposed  to  have  been  valid  ever  since.  "Thou  shalt 
not  kill,"  is  one ;  others  phrase  it,  "Thou  shall  do  no  murder"  ; 
and  in  this  double  version  we  see  at  once  the  beginnings  of 
controversy.  If  you  are  a  Quaker,  you  accept  the  former  ver- 
sion, while  if  you  are  a  member  of  the  military  general  staff 
of  your  country  you  accept  the  latter.  You  maintain  the  right 
to  kill  your  fellow  men,  provided  that  those  who  do  the  killing 
have  been  previously  clad  in  a  special  uniform,  indicating  their 
distinctive  function  as  killers  of  their  fellow  men.  You  main- 
tain, in  other  words,  the  right  of  making  war;  and  presently, 
when  you  get  into  making  war,  you  find  yourself  maintaining 
the  right  to  kill,  not  merely  by  the  old  established  method  of 
the  sword  and  the  bullet,  but  by  means  of  pcison  gases  which 
destroy  the  lives  of  women  and  children,  perhaps  a  whole  city 
full  at  a  time. 

And  also,  of  course,  you  maintain  the  right  to  kill,  provided 
the  killing  has  been  formally  ordered  and  sanctioned  by  a 
man  who  sits  upon  a  raised  bench  and  wears  a  black  robe, 
and  perhaps  a  powdered  wig.  You  consider  that  by  the  simple 
device  of  putting  this  man  into  a  black  robe  and  a  powdered 
wig,  you  endow  him  with  authority  to  judge  and  revise  the 
divine  law.  In  other  words,  you  subject  this  divine  law  to 
human  reason;  and  if  some  religious  fanatic  refuses  to  be  so 
subjected,  you  call  him  by  the  dread  name  "pacifist,"  and 
if  he  attempts  to  preach  his  idea,  you  send  him  to  prison  for 
ten  or  twenty  years,  which  means  in  actual  practice  that  you 
kill  him  by  the  slow  effects  of  malnutrition  and  tubercular 
infection.    If  he  is  ordered  to  put  on  the  special  costume  of 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  33 

killing,  and  refuses  to  do  so,  you  call  him  a  "C.  O./'  and  you 
bully  and  beat  him,  and  perhaps  administer  to  him  the  "water 
cure"  in  your  dungeons. 

Or  taJce  the  commandment  that  we  shall  not  commit 
adultery.  Surely  this  is  a  law  about  which  we  can  agree! 
But  presently  we  discover  that  unhappily  married  couples 
desire  to  part,  and  that  if  we  do  not  ^low  them  to  part,  we 
actually  cause  the  commission  of  a  great  deal  more  adultery 
than  otherwise.  Therefore,  our  wise  men  meet  together,  and 
revise  this  divine  law,  and  decide  that  it  is  not  adultery  if 
a  man  takes  another  wife,  provided  he  has  received  from  a 
judge  an  engraved  piece  of  paper  permitting  him  to  do  so. 
But  some  of  the  followers  of  religion  refuse  to  admit  this 
right  of  mere  mortal  man.  The  Catholic  Church  attempts  to 
enforce  its  own  laws,  and  declares  that  people  who  divorce 
and  remarry  are  really  living  in  adultery  and  committing  mor- 
tal sin.  The  Episcopal  Church  does  not  go  quite  so  far  as 
that;  it  allows  the  innocent  party  in  the  divorce  to  remarry. 
Other  churches  are  content  to  accept  the  state  law  as  it  stands. 
Is  it  not  manifest  that  all  these  groups  are  applying  human 
reason,  and  nothing  but  human  reason,  to  the  interpreting 
and  revising  of  their  divine  commandments? 

Or  take  the  law,  "Thou  shalt  not  steal."  Surely  we  can 
all  agree  upon  that!  Let  us  do  so;  but  our  agreement  gets 
us  nowhere,  because  we  have  to  set  up  a  human  court  to 
decide  what  is  "stealing."  Is  it  stealing  to  seize  upon  land, 
and  kill  the  occupants  of  it,  and  take  the  land  for  your  own, 
and  hand  it  down  to  your  children  forever?  Yes,  of  course, 
that  is  stealing,  you  say;  but  at  once  you  have  to  revise  your 
statement.  It  is  not  stealing  if  it  was  done  a  sufficient  number 
of  years  ago;  in  that  case  the  results  of  it  are  sanctified  by 
law,  and  held  unchangeable  forever.  Also,  we  run  up  against 
the  fact  that  it  is  not  stealing,  if  it  is  done  by  the  State,  by 
men  who  have  been  dressed  up  in  the  costume  of  killers  before 
they  commit  the  act. 

Again,  is  it  stealing  to  hold  land  out  of  use  for  speculation, 
while  other  men  are  starving  and  dying  for  lack  of  land  to 
labor  upon?  Some  of  us  call  this  stealing,  but  we  are  im- 
politely referred  to  as  "radicals,"  and  if  we  venture  to  suggiest 
that  anyone  should  resist  this  kind  of  stealing,  we  are  sen- 
tenced to  slow  death  from  malnutrition  and  tubercular  infec- 
tion.   Again,  is  it  stealing  for  a  victim  of  our  system  of  land 


34  Mind  and  Body 

monopoly  to  take  a  loaf  of  bread  in  order  to  save  the  life  of 
his  starving  child?  The  law  says  that  this  is  stealing,  and 
sends  the  man  to  jail  for  this  act;  yet  the  common  sense  of 
mankind  protests,  and  I  have  heard  a  great  many  respectable 
Americans  venture  so  far  in  "radicalism"  as  to  say  that  they 
themselves  would  steal  under  such  circumstances. 

One  could  pile  up  illustrations  without  limit;  but  this  is 
enough  to  make  clear  the  point,  that  it  is  perfectly  futile  to 
attempt  to  talk  about  "divine"  rules  for  human  conduct.  Re- 
gardless of  any  ideas  you  may  hold,  or  any  wishes,  you  are 
forced  at  every  hour  of  your  life  to  apply  your  reason  to  the 
problems  of  your  life,  and  you  have  no  escape  from  the  task 
of  judging  and  deciding.  All  that  you  do  is  to  judge  right 
or  to  judge  wrong;  and  if  you  judge  wrong,  you  inflict  misery 
upon  yourself  and  upon  all  who  come  into  contact  with  you. 
How  much  more  sensible,  therefore,  to  recognize  the  fact  of 
moral  and  intellectual  responsibility ;  to  investigate  the  data  of 
life  with  which  you  have  to  deal,  the  environment  by  which 
you  are  surrounded,  and  to  train  your  judgment  so  that  you 
will  be  able  to  fit  yourself  to  it  with  quickness  and  certainty ! 

"But,"  the  believer  in  religion  will  say,  "this  leaves  man- 
kind without  any  guide  or  authority.  How  can  human  beings 
act,  how  can  they  deal  with  one  another,  if  there  are  no  laws, 
no  permanent  moral  codes  ?" 

The  answer  is  that  to  accept  the  idea  of  the  evolution  of 
morality  does  not  mean  at  all  that  there  will  be  no  permanent 
laws  and  working  principles.  Many  of  the  facts  of  life  are 
fixed  for  all  practical  purposes — the  purposes  not  merely  of 
your  life  and  my  life,  but  the  life  of  many  generations.  We 
are  not  likely  to  see  in  our  time  the  end  of  the  ancient  Hebrew 
announcement  that  "the  sins  of  the  father  are  visited  upon  the 
children" ;  therefore  it  is  possible  for  us  to  study  out  a  course 
of  action  based  upon  the  duty  of  every  father  to  hand  down 
to  his  children  the  gift  of  a  sound  mind  in  a  sound  body. 
The  Catholic  Church  has  had  for  a  thousand  years  or  more 
the  "mortal  sin"  of  gluttony  upon  its  list;  and  today  comes 
experimental  science  with  its  new  weapons  of  research,  and 
discovers  autointoxication  and  the  hardening  of  the  arteries, 
and  makes  it  very  unlikely  that  the  moral  codes  of  men  will 
ever  fail  to  list  gluttony  as  a  mortal  sin.  Indeed,  science  has 
added  to  gluttony,  not  merely  drunkenness,  but  all  use  of 
alcoholic  liquor  for  beverage  purposes;  we  have  done  this  in 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  35 

spite  of  the  manifest  fact  that  the  drinking  of  wine  was  not 
merely  an  Old  Testament  virtue,  but  a  New  Testament  reli- 
gious rite. 

To  say  that  human  life  changes,  and  that  new  discoveries 
and  new  powers  make  necessary  new  laws  and  moral  customs, 
is  to  say  something  so  obvious  that  it  might  seem  a  waste  of 
paper  and  ink.  Man  has  invented  the  automobile  and  has 
crowded  himself  into  cities,  and  so  has  to  adopt  a  rigid  set  of 
traffic  regulations.  So  far  as  I  know,  it  has  never  occurred 
to  any  religious  enthusiast  to  seek  in  the  book  of  Revelation 
for  information  as  to  the  advisability  of  the  "left  hand  turn" 
at  Broadway  and  Forty-second  Street,  New  York,  at  five 
o'clock  in  the  afternoon.  But  modern  science  has  created 
new  economic  facts,  just  as  unprecedented  as  the  automobile ; 
it  has  created  new  possibilities  of  spending  and  new  possibilities 
of  starving  for  mankind;  it  has  made  new  cravings  and  new 
satisfactions,  new  crimes  and  new  virtues;  and  yet  the  great 
mass  of  our  people  are  still  seeking  to  guide  themselves  in 
their  readjustments  to  these  new  facts  by  ancient  codes  which 
have  no  more  relationship  to  these  facts  than  they  have  to  the 
affairs  of  Mars! 

I  am  acquainted  with  a  certain  lady,  one  of  the  kindest 
and  most  devoted  souls  alive,  who  seeks  to  solve  the  problems 
of  her  life,  and  of  her  large  family  of  children  and  grand- 
children, according  to  sentences  which  she  picks  out,  more 
or  less  at  random,  from  certain  more  or  less  random  chapters 
of  ancient  Hebrew  literature.  This  lady  will  find  some  words 
which  she  imagines  apply  to  the  matter,  and  will  shut  her 
devout  eyes  to  the  fact  that  there  are  other  "texts,"  bearing 
on  the  matter,  which  say  exactly  the  opposite.  She  will  place 
the  strangest  and  most  unimaginable  interpretations  upon  the 
words,  and  yet  will  be  absolutely  certain  that  her  interpretation 
is  the  voice  of  God  speaking  directly  to  her.  If  you  try  to 
tell  her  about  Socialism,  she  will  say,  "The  poor  ye  have 
always  with  you" ;  which  means  that  it  is  interfering  with 
Divine  Providence  to  try  to  remedy  poverty  on  any  large 
scale.  This  lady  is  ready  instantly  to  relieve  any  single  case 
of  want;  she  regards  it  as  her  duty  to  do  this;  in  fact,  she 
considers  that  the  purpose  of  some  people's  poverty  is  to 
provide  her  with  a  chance  to  do  the  noble  action  of  relieving 
it.  You  would  think  that  the  meaning  of  the  sentence,  "Spare 
the  rod  and  spoil  the  child,"  would  be  so  plain  that  no  one 

4 


36  Mind  and  Body 

could  mistake  it;  but  this  good  lady  understood  it  to  mean 
that  God  forbade  the  physical  chastisement  of  children,  and 
preferred  them  "spoiled."  She  held  this  idea  for  half  a  life- 
time— ^until  it  was  pointed  out  to  her  that  the  sentence  was 
not  in  the  Bible,  but  in  "Hudibras,"  an  old  English  poem! 


CHAPTER  VIII 
THE  VIRTUE  OF  MODERATION 

(Attempts  to  show  that  wise  conduct  is  an  adjustment  of  means 
to  ends,  and  depends  upon  the  understanding  of  a  particular  set 
of  circumstances.) 

Some  years  ago  I  used  to  know  an  ardent  single  tax  propa- 
gandist who  found  my  way  of  arguing  intensely  irritating, 
because,  as  he  phrased  it,  I  had  "no  principles."  We  would 
be  discussing,  for  example,  a  protective  tariff,  and  I  would 
wish  to  collect  statistics,  but  discovered  to  my  bewilderment 
that  to  my  single  tax  friend  a  customs  duty  was  "stealing" 
on  the  part  of  the  government.  The  government  had  a  right 
to  tax  land,  because  that  was  the  gift  of  nature,  but  it  had 
no  right  to  tax  the  products  of  human  labor,  and  when  it  took 
a  portion  of  the  goods  which  anyone  brought  into  a  country, 
the  government  was  playing  the  part  of  a  robber.  Of  course 
such  a  man  was  annoyed  by  the  suggestion  that  in  the  early 
stages  of  a  country's  development  it  might  possibly  be  a  good 
thing  for  the  country  to  make  itself  independent  and  self- 
sufificient  by  encouraging  the  development  of  its  manufactures ; 
that,  on  the  other  hand,  when  these  manufactures  had  grown 
to  such  a  size  that  they  controlled  the  government,  it  might  be 
an  excellent  thing  for  the  country  to  subject  them  to  the 
pressure  of  foreign  competition,  in  order  to  lower  their  value 
as  a  preliminary  to  socializing  them. 

The  reader  who  comes  to  this  book  looking  for  hard  and 
fast  rules  of  life  will  be  disappointed.  It  would  be  convenient 
if  someone  could  lay  down  for  us  a  moral  code,  and  lift  from 
our  shoulders  the  inconvenient  responsibility  of  deciding  about 
our  own  lives.  There  may  be  persons  so  weak  that  they  have 
to  have  the  conditions  of  their  lives  thus  determined  for  them ; 
but  I  am  not  writing  for  such  persons.  I  am  writing  for 
adult  and  responsible  individuals,  and  I  bear  in  mind  that 
every  individual  is  a  separate  problem,  with  separate  needs 
and  separate  duties.  There  are,  of  course,  a  good  many  rules 
that  apply  to  everybody  in  almost  all  emergencies,  but  I  cannot 
think  of  a  single  rule  that  I  would  be  willing  to  say  I  would 

37 


38  Mind  and  Body 

apply  in  my  life  without  a  single  exception.  "Thou  shalt  not 
kill"  is  a  rule  that  I  have  followed,  so  far  without  exception ; 
but  as  soon  as  I  turn  my  imagination  loose,  I  can  think  ot 
many  circumstances  under  which  I  should  kill.  I  remember 
discussing  the  matter  with  a  pacifist  friend  of  mine,  an  out- 
and-out  religious  non-resistant.  I  pointed  out  to  him  that 
people  sometimes  went  insane,  and  in  that  condition  they 
sometimes  seized  hatchets  and  killed  anyone  in  sight.  What 
would  my  pacifist  friend  do  if  he  saw  a  maniac  attacking  his 
children  with  a  hatchet?  It  did  not  help  him  to  say  that  he 
would  use  all  possible  means  short  of  killing  the  maniac;  he 
had  finally  to  admit  that  if  he  were  quite  sure  it  was  a  ques- 
tion of  the  life  of  the  maniac  or  the  life  of  his  child,  he  would 
kill.  And  this  is  not  mere  verbal  quibbling,  because  such 
things  do  happen  in  the  world,  and  people  are  confronted  with 
such  emergencies,  and  they  have  to  decide,  and  no  rule  is  a 
general  rule  if  it  has  a  single  exception.  There  is  a  saying 
that  "the  exception  proves  the  rule,"  but  this  is  very  silly;  it 
is  a  mistranslation  of  the  Latin  word  "probat,"  Which  means, 
not  proves,  but  tests.  No  exception  can  prove  a  rule.  What 
the  exception  does  is  to  test  the  rule  by  showing  that  the 
result  does  not  follow  in  the  exceptional  case. 

The  only  kind  of  rule  which  can  be  laid  down  for  human 
conduct  is  a  rule  in  such  general  terms  that  it  escapes  excep- 
tions by  leaving  the  matter  open  for  every  man's  difference 
of  opinion.  Any  kind  of  rule  which  is  specific  will  sooner  or 
later  pass  out  of  date.  Take,  by  way  of  illustration,  the 
ancient  and  well-established  virtue  of  frugality.  Obviously, 
under  a  state  of  nature,  or  of  economic  competition,  it  is 
necessary  for  every  man  to  lay  by  a  store  "for  a  rainy  day." 
But  suppose  we  could  set  up  a  condition  of  economic  security, 
under  which  society  guaranteed  to  every  man  the  full  product 
of  his  labor,  and  the  old  and  the  sick  were  fully  taken  care 
of — ^then  how  foolish  a  man  would  seem  who  troubled  to 
acquire  a  surplus  of  goods!  It  would  be  as  if  we  saw  him 
riding  on  horseback  through  the  main  street  of  our  town  in  a 
full  suit  of  armor! 

I  devote  a  good  deal  of  space  to  this  question  of  a  fixed 
and  unchangeable  morality,  because  it  is  one  of  the  heaviest 
burdens  that  mankind  carries  upon  its  back.  The  record  of 
human  history  is  sickening,  not  so  much  because  of  blood  and 
slaughter,  but  because  of  fanaticism;  because  wherever  the 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  39 

mind  of  man  attempts  to  assert  itself,  to  escape  from  the  blind 
rule  of  animal  greed,  it  adopts  a  set  of  formiilas,  and  proceeds 
to  enforce  them,  regardless  of  consequences,  upon  the  whole 
of  life.  Consider,  for  example,  the  rule  of  the  Puritans  in 
England.  The  Puritans  glorified  conscience,  and  it  is  per- 
fectly proper  to  glorify  conscience,  but  not  to  the  entire  sup- 
pression of  the  beauty-making  faculties  in  man.  Macaulay 
summed  up  the  Puritan  point  of  view  in  the  sentence  that 
they  objected  to  bear-baiting,  not  because  it  gave  pain  to  the 
bear,  but  because  it  gave  pleasure  to  the  spectators.  As  a 
result  of  applying  that  principle,  and  lacing  mankind  in  a 
straight-jacket  by  legislation,  England  swung  back  into  a  re- 
action under  the  Cavaliers,  in  which  debauchery  held  more 
complete  sway  than  ever  before  or  since  in  English  life. 

This  is  a  hard  lesson,  but  it  must  be  learned:  there  is  no 
virtue  that  does  not  become  a  vice  if  it  is  carried  to  extremes ; 
there  is  no  virtue  that  does  not  become  a  vice  if  it  is  applied 
at  the  wrong  time,  or  under  the  wrong  circumstances,  or  at 
the  wrong  stage  of  human  development.  In  fact,  we  may 
say  that  most  vices  are  virtues  misapplied.  The  so-called 
natural  vices  are  simply  natural  impulses  carried  to  excess, 
while  the  tmnatural  vices  result  from  the  suppression  and 
distortion  of  natural  impulses.  The  Greeks  had  as  their 
supreme  virtue  what  they  called  "sophrosune."  It  is  a  beau- 
tiful word,  worth  remembering;  it  means  a  beautiful  quality 
called  moderation.  We  shall  find,  as  we  come  to  investigate, 
that  life  is  a  series  of  compromises  among  many  different 
needs,  many  different  desires,  many  different  duties;  and 
reason  sits  as  a  wise  and  patient  judge,  and  appoints  to  each 
its  proper  portion,  and  denies  to  it  an  excess  which  would 
starve  the  others.  Such  is  true  morality,  and  it  is  incompatible 
with  the  existence  of  any  fixed  code,  whether  of  htunan  origin 
or  divine. 

The  fixed  morality  is  a  survival  of  a  far-off  past,  of  the 
days  of  instinct  and  servitude.  Human  reason  has  developed 
but  slowly,  and  perhaps  only  a  few  people  are  as  yet  entirely 
capable  of  taking  control  of  their  own  destiny;  perhaps  it  is 
really  dangerous  to  think  for  oneself  I  But  if  we  investigate 
carefully,  we  may  decide  that  the  danger  is  not  so  much  to 
ourselves  as  it  is  to  others.  The  most  evil  of  all  the  habits 
that  man  has  inherited  from  his  far-off  past  is  the  habit  of 
exploiting  his  fellows,  and  in  order  to  exploit  them  more 


40  Mind  and  Body 

safely  the  ruling  castes  of  priests  and  kings  and  nobles  and 
property  owners  have  taken  possession  of  the  moralities  of 
the  world  and  shaped  them  for  their  own  convenience.  They 
have  taught  the  slave  virtues  of  credulity  and  submission; 
they  have  surrounded  their  teachings  with  all  the  terrors  of 
the  supernatural ;  they  have  placed  upon  rebellion  the  penalties, 
not  merely  of  this  world,  but  of  the  next,  not  merely  of  the 
dungeon  and  the  rack,  but  of  hellfire  and  brimstone. 

I  do  not  wish  to  go  to  extremes  and  say  that  the  moral 
codes  now  taught  in  the  world  are  made  wholly  in  this  evil 
way.  As  a  matter  of  fact  they  are  a  queer  jumble  of  the  two 
elements,  the  slave  terrors  of  the  past  and  the  common  sense 
of  the  present.  There  is  not  one  moral  code  in  the  world 
today,  there  are  many.  There  is  one  for  the  rich,  and  an 
entirely  different  one  for  the  poor,  and  the  rich  have  had  a 
great  deal  more  to  do  with  shaping  the  code  of  the  poor  than 
the  poor  have  had  to  do  with  shaping  the  code  of  the  rich. 
There  is  one  code  for  governments,  and  an  entirely  different 
one  for  the  victims  of  governments.  There  is  one  code  for 
business,  and  an  entirely  different  one,  a  far  more  human  and 
decent  one,  for  friendship.  Above  all,  there  is  one  code  for 
Sunday  and  another  code  for  the  other  six  days  of  the  week. 
Most  of  our  idealisms  and  our  sentimental  fine  phrases  we 
reserve  for  our  Sunday  code,  while  for  our  every-day  code 
we  go  back  to  the  rule  of  the  jungle :  "Dog  eat  dog,"  or  "Do 
unto  others  as  they  would  do  unto  you,  but  do  it  first."  When 
you  attempt  to  suggest  a  new  moral  code  to  our  present  day 
moral  authorities,  it  is  the  fine  phrases  of  the  Sunday  code 
they  bring  out  for  exhibition  purposes;  and  perhaps  you  are 
impressed  by  their  arguments — until  Monday  morning,  when 
you  attempt  to  apply  this  code  at  the  office,  and  they  stare  at 
you  in  bewilderment,  or  burst  out  laughing  in  your  face. 

What  I  am  trying  to  do  here  is  to  outline  a  code  that  will 
not  be  a  matter  of  phrases  but  a  matter  of  practice.  It  will 
apply  to  all  men,  rich  as  well  as  poor,  and  to  all  seven  days 
of  the  week.  I  am  not  so  much  suggesting  a  code,  as  pointing 
out  to  you  how  you  can  work  out  your  own  code  for  yourself. 
I  am  suggesting  that  you  should  adopt  it,  not  because  I  tell 
you  to,  but  because  you  yourself  have  taken  it  and  tested  it, 
precisely  as  you  would  test  any  other  of  the  practical  affairs 
of  your  life — ^potatoes  as  an  article  of  diet,  or  some  particular 
sack  of  potatoes  that  a  peddler  was  trying  to  sell  to  you.    It  is 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  41 

not  yet  possible  for  you  to  be  as  sure  about  everything  in 
your  life  as  you  can  be  about  a  sdck  of  potatoes;  human 
knowledge  has  not  got  that  far;  but  at  least  you  can  know 
what  is  to  be  known,  and  if  anything  is  a  matter  of  uncer- 
tainty, you  can  know  that.  Such  knowledge  is  often  the  most 
important  of  all — just  as  the  driver  of  an  automobile  wants 
to  know  if  a  bridge  is  not  to  be  depended  on. 

So  I  say  to  you  that  if  you  want  to  find  happiness  in  this 
life,  look  with  distrust  upon  all  absolutes  and  ultimates,  all 
hard  and  fast  rules,  all  formulas  and  dogmas  and  "general 
principles."  Bear  in  mind  that  there  are  many  factors  in  every 
case,  there  are  many  complications  in  every  human  being, 
there  are  many  sides  to  every  question.  Try  to  keep  an  open 
mind  and  an  even  temper.  Try  to  take  an  interest  in  learning 
something  new  every  day,  and  in  trying  some  new  experi- 
ment. This  is  the  scientific  attitude  toward  life;  this  is  the 
way  of  growth  and  of  true  success.  It  is  inconvenient,  be- 
cause it  involves  working  your  brains,  and  most  people  have 
not  been  taught  to  do  this,  and  find  it  the  hardest  kind  of 
work  there  is.  But  how  much  better  it  is  to  think  for  your- 
self, and  to  protect  yourself,  than  to  trust  your  thinking  to 
some  group  of  people  whose  only  interest  may  be  to  exploit 
you  for  their  advantage ! 


CHAPTER  IX 
THE  CHOOSING  OF  LIFE 

(Discusses  the  standards  by  which  we  may  judge  what  is  best 
in  life,  and  decide  what  we  wish  to  make  of  it.) 

We  have  made  the  point  about  evolution,  that  it  may  go 
forward  or  it  may  go  backward.  There  is  no  guarantee  in 
nature  that  because  a  thing  changes,  it  must  necessarily  be- 
come better  than  it  was.  On  the  contrary,  degeneration  is  as 
definitely  established  a  fact  as  growth,  and  it  is  of  the  utmost 
importance,  in  studying  the  problem  of  human  happiness  and 
how  to  make  it,  to  get  clear  the  fact  that  nature  has  produced, 
and  continues  to  produce,  all  kinds  of  monstrosities  and  para- 
sites and  failures  and  abortions.  And  all  these  blunders  of 
our  great  mother  struggle  just  as  hard,  desire  hfe  just  as 
ardently  as  normal  creatures,  and  suffer  just  as  cruelly  when 
they  fail.  Blind  optimism  about  life  is  just  as  fatuous  and 
just  as  dangerous  as  blind  pessimism,  and  if  we  propose  to 
take  charge  of  life,  and  to  make  it  over,  we  shall  find  that  we 
have  to  get  quickly  to  the  task  of  deciding  what  our  purpose  is. 

"Choose  well,  your  choice  is  brief  and  yet  endless,"  says 
Carlyle.  You  are  driven  in  your  choice  by  two  facts — first, 
that  you  have  to  choose,  regardless  of  whether  you  want  to 
or  not;  and  second,  that  upon  your  choice  depend  infinite 
possibilities  of  happiness  or  of  misery.  The  interdependence 
of  life  is  such  that  you  are  choosing  not  merely  for  the  present, 
but  for  the  future ;  you  are  choosing  for  your  posterity  forever, 
and  to  some  extent  you  are  choosing  for  all  mankind.  Matthew 
Arnold  has  said  that  "Conduct  is  three-fourths  of  life";  but 
I,  for  my  part,  have  never  been  able  to  see  where  he  got  his 
figures.  It  seems  to  me  that  conduct  is  practically  everything 
in  life  that  really  counts.  Conduct  is  not  merely  marriage  and 
birth  and  premature  death ;  it  is  not  merely  eating  and  drink- 
ing and  sleeping :  it  is  thinking  and  aspiring ;  it  is  religion  and 
science,  music  and  literature  and  art.  It  is  not  yet  the  light- 
ning and  the  cyclone,  but  with  the  spread  of  knowledge  it  is 
coming  to  be  these  things,  and  I  suspect  that  some  day  it  may 
be  even  the  comet  and  the  rising  of  the  sun. 

42 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  43 

We  are  now  going  to  apply  our  reason  to  this  enormous 
problem  of  human  conduct ;  we  are  going  to  ask  ourselves  the 
question:  What  kind  of  life  do  we  want?  What  kind  of  life 
are  we  going  to  make  ?  What  are  the  standards  by  which  we 
may  know  excellence  in  life,  and  distinguish  it  from  failure 
and  waste  and  blunder  in  life?  Obviously,  when  we  have  done 
this,  we  shall  have  solved  the  moral  problem ;  all  we  shall  have 
to  say  is,  act  so  that  your  actions  help  to  bring  the  desirable 
things  into  being,  and  do  not  act  so  as  to  hinder  or  weaken 
them. 

We  shall  not  be  able  to  go  to  nature  to  settle  this  ques- 
tion for  us.  This  is  our  problem,  not  nature's.  But  we  shall 
find,  as  usual,  that  we  can  pick  up  precious  hints  from  her; 
we  shall  be  wise  to  study  her  ways,  and  learn  from  her  suc- 
cesses and  her  failures.  We  are  proud  of  her  latest  product, 
ourselves.  Let  us  see  how  she  made  us ;  what  were  the  stages 
on  the  way  to  man? 

First  in  the  scale  of  evolution,  it  appears,  came  inert  matter. 
We  call  it  inert,  because  it  looks  that  way,  though  we  know, 
of  course,  that  it  consists  of  infinite  numbers  of  molecules 
vibrating  with  speed  which  we  can  measure  even  though  we 
cannot  imagine  it.  This  "matter"  is  enormously  fascinating, 
and  a  wise  man  will  hesitate  to  speak  patronizingly  about  it. 
Nevertheless,  considering  matter  apart  from  the  mind  which 
-studies  it,  we  decide  that  it  represents  a  low  stage  of  being. 
We  speak  contemptuously  of  stones  and  clods  and  lumps  of 
clay.  We  award  more  respect  to  things  like  mountains  and 
tempest-tossed  oceans,  because  they  are  big ;  in  the  early  days 
of  our  race  we  used  to  worship  these  things,  but  now  we  think 
of  them  merely  as  the  raw  material  of  life,  and  we  should 
not  be  in  the  least  interested  in  becoming  a  mountain  or  an 
ocean. 

Almost  everyone  would  agree,  therefore,  that  what  we 
call  "life"  is  a  higher  and  more  important  achievement  of 
nature.  And  if  we  wish  to  grade  this  life,  we  do  so  accord- 
ing to  its  sentience — that  is  to  say,  the  amount  and  intensity 
of  the  consciousness  which  grows  in  it.  We  are  interested  in 
the  one-celled  organisms  which  swarm  everywhere  throughout 
nature,  and  we  study  the  mysterious  processes  by  which  they 
nourish  and  beget  themselves;  we  suspect  that  they  have  a 
germ  of  consciousness  in  them;  but  we  are  surer  of  the 
meaning  and  importance  of  the  consciousness  we  detect  in 


44  Mind  and  Body 

some  complex  organism  like  a  fish  or  bird.  We  learn  to  know 
the  signs  of  consciousness,  of  dawning  intelligence,  and  we 
esteem  the  various  kinds  of  creatures  according  to  the  amount 
of  it  they  possess.  We  reject  mere  physical  bigness  and 
mere  strength.    Joyce  Kilmer  may  write: 

"Poems  are  made  by  men  like  me, 
But  only  God  can  make  a  tree" — 

And  that  seems  to  us  a  charming  bit  of  fancy ;  but  the  com- 
mon sense  of  the  thing  is  voiced  to  us  much  better  in  the 
lines  of  old  Ben  Jonson: 

"It  is  not  growing  like  a  tree 
In  bulk  doth  make  man  better  be." 

If  we  take  two  animals  of  equal  bulk,  the  hippopotaimis  and 
the  elephant,  we  shall  be  far  more  interested  in  the  elephant, 
because  of  the  intelligence  and  what  we  call  "character"  which 
he  displays.  There  are  good  elephants  and  bad  elepliants, 
kind  ones  and  treacherous  ones.  We  love  the  dog  because  we 
can  make  a  companion  of  him;  that  is,  because  we  can  teach 
him  to  react  to  human  stimuli.  Of  all  animals  we  are  fasci- 
nated most  by  the  monkey,  because  he  is  nearest  to  man,  and 
displays  the  keenest  intelligence. 

Someone  may  say  that  this  is  all  mere  human  egotism, 
and  that  we  have  no  way  of  really  being  sure  that  the  life  of 
elephants  and  hippopotami  is  not  more  interesting  and  sig- 
nificant than  the  life  of  men.  Never  having  been  either  of 
these  animals,  I  cannot  say  with  assurance;  but  I  know  that 
I  have  the  power  to  exterminate  these  creatures,  or  to  pen 
them  in  cages,  and  they  are  helpless  to  protect  themselves, 
or  even  to  tmderstand  what  is  happening  to  them.  So  I  am 
irresistibly  driven  to  conclude  that  intelligence  is  more  safe 
and  more  worth  while  than  unintelligence ;  in  short,  that  intelli- 
gence is  nature's  highest  product  up  to  date,  and  that  to 
foster  and  develop  it  is  the  best  guess  I  can  make  as  to  the 
path  of  wisdom — that  is,  of  intelligence! 

When  we  come  to  deal  with  human  values,  we  find  that 
we  can  trace  much  the  same  kind  of  evolution.  Back  in  the 
days  of  the  cave  man,  it  was  physical  strength  which  dominated 
the  horde;  but  nowadays,  except  in  the  imagination  of  the 
small  boy,  the  "strong  man"  does  not  cut  much  of  a  figure. 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  45 

We  go  once,  perhaps,  to  see  him  lift  his  heavy  weights  and 
break  his  iron  bars,  but  then  we  are  tired  of  him.  Mere 
strength  had  to  yield  in  the  struggle  for  life  to  quickness  of 
eye  and  hand,  to  energy  which  for  lack  of  a  better  name  we 
may  call  "nervous."  The  pugilist  who  has  nothing  but  muscle 
goes  down  before  his  lighter  antagonist  who  can  keep  out  of 
his  reach,  and  the  crowd  loves  the  football  hero  who  can  duck 
and  dodge  and  make  the  long  runs.  One  might  cite  a  thou- 
sand illustrations,  such  as  the  British  bowmen  breaking  down 
the  heavily  armored  knights,  or  the  quick-moving,  light  vessels 
of  Britain  overcoming  the  huge  galleons  of  Spain.  And  as 
society  develops  and  becomes  more  complex,  the  fighting  man 
becomes  less  and  less  a  man  of  muscle,  and  more  and  more 
a  man  of  "nerve."  Alexander,  Csesar  and  Napoleon  would 
have  stood  a  poor  chance  in  personal  combat  against  many  of 
their  followers.  They  led,  because  they  were  men  of  energy 
and  cunning,  able  to  maintain  the  subtle  thing  we  call  prestige. 

Now  the  world  has  moved  into  an  industrial  era,  and  who 
are  the  great  men  of  our  time,  the  men  whose  lightest  words 
are  heeded,  whose  doings  are  spread  upon  the  front  pages  of 
our  newspapers?  Obviously,  they  are  the  men  of  money. 
We  may  pretend  to  ourselves  that  we  do  not  really  stand  in 
awe  of  a  Morgan  or  a  Rockefeller,  but  that  we  admire,  let 
us  say,  an  Exiison  or  a  Roosevelt.  But  Edison  himself  is  a 
man  of  money,  and  will  tell  you  that  he  had  to  be  a  man  of 
money  in  order  to  be  free  to  conduct  his  experiments.  As  for 
our  politicians  and  statesmen,  they  either  serve  the  men  of 
money,  or  the  men  of  money  suppress  them,  as  they  did 
Roosevelt.  The  Morgans  and  the  Rockefellers  do  not  do  much 
talking;  they  do  not  have  to.  They  content  themselves  with 
being  obeyed,  and  the  shaping  of  our  society  is  in  their  hands. 

And  yet,  some  of  us  really  believe  that  there  are  higher 
faculties  in  man  than  the  ability  to  manipulate  the  stock 
market.  We  consider  that  the  great  inventor,  the  great  poet, 
the  great  moralist,  contributes  more  to  human  happiness  than 
the  man  who,  by  cunning  and  persistence,  succeeds  in  monopo- 
lizing some  material  necessity  of  human  life.  "Poets,"  says 
Shelley,  "are  the  unacknowledged  legislators  of  mankind." 
If  this  strange  statement  is  anywhere  near  to  truth,  it  is  surely 
of  importance  that  we  should  decide  what  are  the  higher 
powers  in  men,  and  how  they  may  be  recognized,  and  how 
fostered  and  developed. 


46  Mind  and  Body 

What  is,  in  its  essence,  the  process  of  evolution  from  the 
lower  to  the  higher  forms  of  mental  life?  It  is  a  process  of 
expanding  consciousness;  the  developing  of  ability  to  appre- 
hend a  wider  and  wider  circle  of  existence,  to  share  it,  to 
struggle  for  it  as  we  do  for  the  life  we  call  our  "own."  The 
test  of  the  higher  mental  forms  is  therefore  a  test  of  univer- 
sality, of  sympathetic  inclusiveness ;  or,  to  use  commoner 
words,  it  is  a  test  of  enlightened  unselfishness. 

Every  human  individual  has  the  will  to  life,  the  instinct 
of  self-preservation,  which  persuades  him  that  he  is  of  im- 
portance; but  the  test  of  his  development  is  his  ability  to 
realize  that,  important  though  he  may  be,  he  is  but  a  small 
part  of  the  universe,  and  his  highest  interests  are  not  in  him- 
self alone,  his  highest  duties  are  not  owed  to  himself  alone. 
And  as  the  life  becomes  more  of  the  intellect,  this  fact  be- 
comes more  and  more  obvious,  more  and  more  dominating. 
Men  who  monopolize  the  material  things  of  the  world  and 
their  control  are  necessarily  self-seeking;  but  in  the  realm 
of  the  higher  faculties  this  element,  in  the  very  nature  of  the 
case,  is  forced  into  the  background.  It  is  evident  that  truth 
is  not  truth  for  the  Standard  Oil  Company,  nor  for  J.  P. 
Morgan  and  Company,  nor  yet  for  the  government  of  the 
United  States ;  it  is  truth  for  the  whole  of  mankind,  and  one 
who  sincerely  labors  for  the  truth  does  so  for  the  universal 
benefit. 

There  may  be,  of  course,  an  element  of  selfishness  in  the 
activities  of  poets  and  inventors.  They  may  be  seeking  for 
fame;  they  may  be  hoping  to  make  money  out  of  their  dis- 
coveries ;  but  the  greatest  men  we  know  have  been  dominated 
by  an  overwhelming  impulse  of  creation,  and  when  we  read 
their  lives,  and  discover  in  them  signs  of  petty  vanity  or 
jealousy  or  greed,  we  are  pained  and  shocked.  What  touches 
us  most  deeply  is  some  mark  of  self-consecration  and  humility ; 
as,  for  example,  when  Newton  tells  us  that  after  all  his  life's 
labors  he  felt  himself  as  a  little  child  gathering  sea-shells  on 
the  shore  of  the  great  ocean  of  truth ;  or  when  Alfred  Russel 
Wallace,  discovering  that  Darwin  had  been  working  longer 
than  himself  over  the  theory  of  the  origin  of  species,  gen- 
erously withdrew  and  permitted  the  theory  to  go  to  the  world 
in  Darwin's  name. 

There  are  three  faculties  in  man,  usually  described  as  in- 
tellect, feeling  and  will.    According  as  one  or  the  other  faculty 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  47 

predominates,  we  have  a  great  scientist,  a  great  poet,  or  a 
great  moralist.  We  might  choose  a  representative  of  each 
type — let  us  say  Newton,  Shakespeare  and  Jesus — and  spend 
much  time  in  controversy  as  to  which  of  the  three  types  is 
the  greatest,  which  makes  the  greatest  contribution  to  human 
happiness.  But  it  will  suffice  here  to  point  out  that  the  three 
faculties  do  not  exclude  one  another;  every  man  must  have 
all  three,  and  a  perfectly  rounded  man  should  seek  to  develop 
all  three.  Jesus  was  considerable  of  a  poet,  and  we  should  pay 
far  less  heed  to  Shakespeare  if  he  had  not  been  a  moralist. 
Also  there  have  been  instances  of  great  poets  and  painters  who 
were  scientists — for  example,  Leonardo  and  Goethe. 

The  fundamental  difference  between  the  scientist  and  the 
poet  is  that  one  is  exploring  nature  and  discovering  things 
which  actually  exist,  whereas  the  other  is  creating  new  life 
out  of  his  own  spirit.  But  the  poet  will  find  that  his  creations 
take  but  little  hold  upon  life,  if  they  are  not  guided  and  shaped 
by  a  deep  understanding  of  life's  fundamental  nature  and 
needs — in  other  words,  if  the  poet  is  not  something  of  a 
scientist.  And  in  the  same  way,  the  very  greatest  discoveries 
of  science  seem  to  us  like  leaps  of  creative  imagination;  as  if 
the  mind  had  completed  nature,  through  some  intuitive  and 
sympathetic  understanding  of  what  nature  wished  to  be. 

The  point  about  these  higher  forms  of  human  activity  is 
that  they  renew  and  multiply  life.  We  may  say  that  if  Jesus 
had  never  lived,  others  would  have  embodied  and  set  forth 
with  equal  poignancy  the  revolutionary  idea  of  the  equality 
of  all  men  as  children  of  one  common  father.  And  perhaps 
this  is  true ;  but  we  have  no  way  of  being  sure  that  it  is  true, 
and  as  we  look  back  upon  the  last  nineteen  hundred  years  of 
human  history,  we  are  unable  to  imagine  just  what  the  life  of 
mankind  during  those  centuries  would  have  been  if  Jesus  had 
died  when  he  was  a  baby.  We  do  not  know  what  modern 
thought  might  have  been  without  Kant,  or  what  modem  music 
might  have  been  without  Beethoven.  We  are  forced  to  admit 
that  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  patient  wisdom  and  persuasive 
kindness  of  Lincoln,  the  Slave  Power  might  have  won  its 
independence,  and  America  today  might  have  been  a  military 
camp  like  Europe,  and  the  lives  and  thoughts  of  every  one  of 
us  would  have  been  diflFerent. 

Or  take  the  activities  of  the  poet.  Many  years  ago  the 
.writer   was    asked   to   name   the    men    who    had   exercised 


48  Mind  and  Body 

the  greatest  influence  upon  him,  and  after  much  thought  he 
named  three :  Jesus,  Hamlet  and  Shelley.  And  now  consider 
the  significance  of  this  reply.  One  of  these  people,  Shelley, 
was  what  we  call  a  "real"  person ;  that  is,  a  man  who  actually 
lived  and  walked  upon  the  earth.  Concerning  Hamlet,  it  is 
believed  there  was  once  a  Prince  of  Denmark  by  that  name, 
but  the  character  who  is  known  to  us  as  Hamlet  is  the  crea- 
tion of  a  poet's  brain.  As  to  the  third  figure,  Jesus,  the  authori- 
ties dispute.  Some  say  that  he  was  a  man  who  actually  lived ; 
others  believe  that  he  was  God  on  earth;  yet  others,  very 
learned,  maintain  that  he  is  a  legendary  name  around  which 
a  number  of  traditions  have  gathered. 

To  me  it  does  not  make  a  particle  of  difference  which  of 
the  three  possibilities  happens  to  be  true  about  Jesus.  If  he 
was  God  on  earth,  he  was  God  in  human  form,  imder  human 
limitations,  and  in  that  sense  we  are  all  gods  on  earth.  And 
whether  he  really  lived,  or  whether  some  poet  invented  him, 
matters  not  a  particle  so  far  as  concerns  his  effect  upon  others. 
The  emotions  which  moved  him,  the  loves,  the  griefs,  the 
high  resolves,  existed  in  the  soul  of  someone,  whether  his 
name  were  Jesus  or  John;  and  these  emotions  have  been  re- 
corded in  such  form  that  they  communicate  themselves  to  us, 
they  become  a  part  of  our  souls,  they  make  us  something 
different  from  what  we  were  before  we  encountered  them. 

In  other  words,  the  poet  makes  in  his  own  soul  a  new  life, 
and  then  projects  it  into  the  world,  and  it  becomes  a  force 
which  makes  over  the  lives  of  millions  of  other  people.  If 
you  read  the  vast  mass  of  criticism  which  has  grown  up  about 
the  figure  of  Hamlet,  you  learn  that  Hamlet  is  the  type  of  the 
"modern  man."  Shakespeare  was  able  to  divine  what  the 
modern  man  would  be;  or  perhaps  we  can  go  farther  and 
say  that  Shakespeare  helped  to  make  the  modern  man  what 
he  is ;  the  modern  man  is  more  of  Hamlet,  because  he  has  taken 
Hamlet  to  his  heart  and  pondered  over  Hamlet's  problem. 
Or  take  Don  Quixote.  No  doubt  the  follies  of  the  "age  of 
chivalry"  would  have  died  out  of  men's  hearts  in  the  end; 
but  how  much  sooner  they  died  because  of  the  laughter  of 
Cervantes !  Or  take  "Les  Miserables."  Our  prison  system 
is  not  ideal  by  any  means,  but  it  is  far  less  cruel  than  it  was 
half  a  century  ago,  and  we  owe  this  in  part  to  Victor  Hugo. 
Every  convict  in  the  world  is  to  some  degree  a  happier  man 
because  of  this  vision  which  was  projected  upon  the  world 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  49 

fpom  the  sotil  of  one  great  poet.  No  one  can  estimate  the 
part  which  the  writings  of  Tolstoi  have  played  in  the  present 
revolution  in  Russia,  but  this  we  may  say  with  certainty :  there 
is  not  one  man,  woman  or  child  in  Russia  at  the  present 
moment  who  is  quite  the  same  as  he  would  have  been  if 
"Resurrection"  had  never  been  written. 

In  discussing  the  highest  faculties  of  man  we  have  so  far 
refrained  from  using  the  word  "genius."  It  is  a  word  which 
has  been  cheapened  by  misuse,  but  we  are  now  in  position  to 
use  it.  The  things  which  we  have  just  been  considering  are 
the  phenomena  of  genius — and  we  can  say  this,  even  though 
we  may  not  know  exactly  what  genius  is.  Perhaps  it  is,  as 
Frederic  Myers  asserts,  a  "subliminal  uprush,"  the  welling  up 
into  the  consciousness  of  some  part  of  the  content  of  the 
subconscious  mind.  Or  perhaps  it  is  something  of  what  man 
calls  "divine."  Or  perhaps  it  is  the  first  dawning,  the  hrst 
hint  of  that  super-race  which  will  some  day  replace  mankind. 
Perhaps  we  are  witnessing  the  same  thing  that  hapitened  on 
the  earth  when  glimmerings  of  reason  first  broke  upon  the 
mind  of  some  poor,  bewildered  ape.  We  cannot  be  sure; 
but  this  much  we  can  say:  the  man  of  genius  represents  the 
highest  activity  of  the  mind  of  which  we  as  yet  have  knowledge. 
He  represents  the  spirit  of  man,  fully  emancipated,  fully  con- 
scious, and  taking  up  the  task  of  creation ;  taking  human  life 
as  raw  material,  and  making  it  over  into  something  more 
subtle,  more  intense,  more  significant,  more  universal  than  it 
ever  was  before,  or  ever  would  have  been  without  the  inter- 
vention of  this  new  Go,d-nian. 


CHAPTER  X 
MYSELF  AND   MY  NEIGHBOR 

(Compares  the  new  morality  with  the  old,  and  discusses  the 
relative  importance  of  our  various  duties.) 

So  now  we  may  say  that  we  know  what  are  the  great  and 
important  things  in  hfe.  Slowly  and  patiently,  with  infinite 
distress  and  waste  and  failure,  but  yet  inevitably,  the  life  of 
man  is  being  made  over  and  multiplied  to  infinity,  by  the  power 
of  the  thinking  mind,  impelled  by  the  joy  and  thrill  of  the 
creative  action,  and  guided  by  the  sense  of  responsibility, 
the  instinct  to  serve,  which  we  call  conscience.  To  develop 
these  higher  faculties  is  the  task  we  have  before  us,  and  the 
supreme  act  to  which  we  dedicate  ourselves. 

So  now  we  are  in  position  to  define  the  word  moral. 
Assuming  that  our  argument  be  accepted,  that  action  is  moral 
which  tends  to  foster  the  best  and  highest  forms  of  life  we 
know,  and  to  aid  them  in  developing  their  highest  powers ;  that 
is  immoral  which  tends  to  destroy  the  best  life  we  know,  or 
to  hinder  its  rapid  development. 

Let  us  now  proceed  to  apply  these  tests  to  the  practices 
of  man;  first  as  an  individual,  and  then  as  a  social  being. 
What  are  my  duties  to  myself,  and  what  are  my  duties  to  the 
world  about  me? 

You  will  note  that  these  questions  differ  somewhat  from 
those  of  the  old  morality.  Jesus  told  us,  first,  that  we  should 
love  the  Lord  our  God,  and,  second,  that  we  should  love  our 
neighbor  as  ourself.  Some  would  say  that  modem  thought 
has  dismissed  God  from  consideration ;  but  I  would  prefer 
to  say  that  modern  thought  has  decided  that  the  place  where 
we  encounter  God  most  immediately  is  in  our  own  miraculously 
expanding  consciousness.  Our  duty  toward  God  is  our  duty 
to  make  of  ourselves  the  most  perfect  product  of  the  Divine 
Incarnation  that  we  can  become.  Our  duty  to  our  neighbor 
is  to  help  him  to  do  the  same. 

Of  course,  as  we  come  to  apply  these  formulas,  we  find 
that  they  overlap  and  mingle  inextricably ;  the  two  duties  are 
really  one  duty  looked  at  from  different  points  of  view.    We 

60 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  51 

decide  that  we  owe  it  to  ourselves  to  develop  our  best  powers 
of  thinking,  and  we  discover  that  in  so  doing  we  make  our- 
selves better  fitted  to  live  as  citizens,  better  equipped  to  help 
our  fellow  men.  We  go  out  into  our  city  to  serve  others  by 
making  the  city  clean  and  decent,  and  we  find  that  we  have 
helped  to  save  ourselves  from  a  pestilence. 

The  most  commonly  accepted,  or  at  any  rate  the  most 
commonly  preached,  of  all  formulas  is  the  "golden  rule,"  "Do 
unto  others  as  you  would  have  them  do  unto  you."  This 
formula  is  good  so  far  as  it  goes,  but  you  note  that  it  leaves 
undetermined  the  all-important  question,  what  ought  we  to 
want  others  to  do  unto  us.  If  I  am  an  untrained  child,  what 
I  would  have  others  do  unto  me  is  to  give  me  plenty  of 
candy;  therefore,  under  the  golden  rule,  my  highest  duty 
becomes  to  distribute  free  candy  to  the  world.  The  "golden 
rule"  is  obviously  consistent  with  all  forms  of  self-indulgence, 
and  with  all  forms  of  stagnation ;  it  might  result  in  a  civiliza- 
tion more  static  than  China. 

Or  let  us  take  the  formula  which  the  German  philosopher 
Kant  worked  out  as  the  final  product  of  his  thinking:  "Act 
so  that  you  would  be  willing  for  your  action  to  become  a 
general  rule  of  conduct."  Here  again  is  the  same  problem. 
There  are  many  possible  general  rules  of  conduct.  Some 
would  prefer  one,  some  others ;  and  there  is  no  possible  way 
of  escape  from  the  fact  that  before  men  can  agree  what  to 
do,  they  must  decide  what  they  wish  to  make  of  their  lives. 

To  the  formula  of  Jesus,  "Thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbor 
as  thyself,"  the  answer  is  obvious  enough:  "Suppose  my 
neighbor  is  not  worthy  of  as  much  love  as  myself?"  To  be 
sure,  it  is  a  perilous  thing  for  me  to  have  to  decide  this  ques- 
tion; nevertheless,  it  may  be  a  fact  that  I  am  a  great  in- 
ventor, and  that  my  neighbor  is  a  sexual  pervert.  There  is, 
of  course,  a  sense  in  which  I  may  love  him,  even  so;  I  may 
love  the  deeper  possibilities  of  his  nature,  which  religious 
ecstasy  can  appeal  to  and  arouse.  But  in  spite  of  all  ecstasies 
and  all  efforts,  it  may  be  that  his  disease — physical,  mental 
and  moral — has  progressed  to  such  a  point  that  it  is  necessary 
to  confine  him,  or  to  castrate  him,  or  even  to  asphyxiate  him 
painlessly.  To  say  that  I  must  love  such  a  man  as  myself 
is,  to  say  the  least,  to  be  vague.  We  can  see  how  the  in- 
discriminate preaching  of  such  a  formula  would  open  the 
flood-gates  of  sentimentality  and  fraud. 


52  Mind  and  Body 

Modern  thinking  says:  Thou  shalt  love  the  highest  pos- 
sibiHties  of  life,  and  thou  shalt  labor  diligently  to  foster  them ; 
moreover,  because  life  is  always  growing,  and  new  possibilities 
are  forever  dawning  in  the  human  spirit,  thou  shalt  keep  an 
open  mind  and  an  inquiring  temper,  and  be  ready  at  any  time 
to  begin  life  afresh. 

Such  is  the  formula.  It  is  not  simple ;  and  when  we  come 
to  apply  it,  we  find  that  it  constantly  grows  more  complex. 
When  we  attempt  to  decide  our  duty  to  ourselves,  we  find  that 
we  have  in  us  a  number  of  different  beings,  each  with  separate 
and  sometimes  conflicting  duties  and  needs.  We  have  in  us 
the  physical  man  and  the  economic  man,  and  these  clamor 
for  their  rights,  and  must  have  at  least  a  part  of  their  rights, 
before  we  can  go  on  to  be  the  intellectual  man,  the  moral 
man,  or  the  artistic  man.  So  our  life  becomes  a  series  of 
compromises  and  adjustments  between  a  thousand  conflicting 
desires  and  duties ;  between  the  different  beings  which  we  might 
be,  but  can  be  only  to  a  certain  extent,  and  at  certain  times. 
We  shall  see,  as  we  come  to  investigate  one  field  after  another 
of  human  activity,  that  we  never  have  an  absolute  certainty, 
never  an  absolute  right,  never  an  absolute  duty;  never  can 
we  shut  our  eyes,  and  go  blindly  ahead  upon  one  course  of 
action,  to  the  exclusion  of  every  other  consideration !  On  the 
contrary,  we  sit  in  the  seat  of  self-determination  as  a  highly 
trained  and  skillful  engineer.  We  keep  our  eyes  upon  a  dozen 
different  gauges ;  we  press  a  lever  here  and  touch  a  regulator 
there;  we  decide  that  now  is  a  time  for  speed,  and  now  for 
caution ;  and  knowing  all  the  time  that  the  safety,  not  merely 
of  ourselves,  but  of  many  passengers,  depends  upon  the  deci- 
sions of  each  moment. 


CHAPTER  XI 
THE  MIND  AND  THE  BODY 

(Discusses  the  interaction  between  physical  and  mental  things, 
and  the  possibility  of  freedom  in  a  world  of  fixed  causes.) 

It  is  our  plan,  so  far  as  possible,  to  discuss  the  problems 
of  the  mind  in  one  section  of  this  book,  and  the  problems  of 
the  body  in  another;  but  just  as  we  found  that  we  could  not 
separate  our  duties  to  ourself  from  our  duties  to  our  neigh- 
bors, so  we  find  that  the  mind  and  the  body  are  inextricably 
interwoven,  and  that  whenever  we  probe  deeply  into  one,  we 
discover  the  other.  The  interaction  of  the  mind  and  the  body 
is  a  fascinating  problem  into  which  we  must  look  for  a 
moment,  not  because  we  expect  to  solve  it,  but  because  it 
illuminates  the  whole  subject. 

The  human  body  is  a  machine.  It  takes  in  carbon  and 
oxygen,  and  burns  them,  and  gives  out  carbon  dioxide  and 
other  waste  products,  and  develops  energy  in  proportion  to 
the  amount  of  carbon  it  consumes.  This  machine  has  its 
elaborate  apparatus  of  action  and  reaction,  its  sensory  organs 
where  outside  stimuli  are  received,  its  nerves  like  telegraph 
wires  to  carry  these  impressions,  its  brain  cells  to  store  them 
and  to  transform  them  into  reactions.  We  know  to  some 
extent  how  these  brain  cells  work.  We  know  what  portions 
of  the  brain  are  devoted  to  this  or  that  activity.  We  know 
that  if  we  stick  a  pin  into  a  certain  spot  we  shall  paralyze 
the  left  forefinger.  We  know  that  by  injecting  a  certain  drug, 
or  by  breathing  a  certain  gas,  we  can  cause  this  or  that  sensa- 
tion or  reaction,  such  as  laughing  or  weeping  or  mania.  We 
Icnow  what  poisons  are  generated  in  the  system  by  anger,  and 
what  chemical  changes  takes  place  in  a  muscle  that  is  tired. 
All  this  is  part  of  a  vast  new  science  which  is  called  bio- 
chemistry, or  the  chemistry  of  life. 

Our  bodies,  therefore,  are  part  of  the  material  universe, 
and  subject  to  the  laws  or  ways  of  being  of  this  universe. 
The  first  of  these  laws  that  we  know  is  the  law  of  causation. 
Every  change  in  the  universe  has  its  cause,  and  that  in  turn 

63 


54  Mind  and  Body 

had  another  cause;  this  chain  is  never  broken,  no  matter  how 
far  we  go,  and  the  same  causes  universally  produce  the  same 
effects.  If  you  see  a  ball  move  on  a  billiard  table,  you  know 
that  the  ball  did  not  move  itself ;  you  know  that  something 
struck  the  ball  or  tilted  the  table.  You  discover  that  the  motion 
of  the  ball  moves  the  air  around  it,  and  the  waves  of  that 
motion  are  spread  through  the  room.  They  strike  the  walls, 
and  the  motion  is  carried  on  through  the  walls,  and  if  we 
had  instruments  sensitive  enough,  we  could  feel  the  motion  of 
that  billiard  ball  at  the  other  side  of  the  world,  and  a  few 
million  years  from  now  at  the  most  remote  of  the  stars.  This 
is  what  is  called  the  law  of  the  conservation  of  energy,  and 
when  we  discover  something  like  radium  which  seems  to  violate 
that  law  by  giving  out  unlimited  quantities  of  energy,  we 
investigate  and  discover  a  new  form  of  energy  locked  up  in 
the  atom.  In  the  disintegration  of  the  atom  we  have  a  source 
of  power  which,  when  we  have  learned  to  use  it,  will  multiply 
perhaps  millions  of  times  the  powers  we  are  now  able  to  use 
on  this  earth.  But  energy,  no  matter  how  many  times  it  is 
transformed,  and  in  what  strange  ways  it  reappears,  always 
remains,  and  is  never  destroyed,  and  never  created  out  of 
nothing. 

My  friend  the  great  physiologist  once  took  me  into  his 
laboratory  and  showed  me  a  little  aquarium  in  which  some 
minute  creatures  were  wiggling  about — young  sea-urchins,  if 
I  remember.  The  physiologist  took  a  bottle  containing  some 
chemical,  and  dropped  a  single  drop  into  the  water,  and  in- 
stantly all  these  little  black  creatures,  which  had  been  darting 
aimlessly  in  every  direction  through  the  water,  turned  and 
swam  all  in  one  direction,  toward  the  light.  They  swam  until 
they  touched  the  walls  of  the  aquarium,  and  there  they  stuck, 
trying  their  best  to  swim  farther.  "And  now,"  said  my  friend, 
"that  is  what  we  call  a  'tropism,*  and  all  life  is  a  tropism. 
What  you  see  in  that  aquarium  means  that  some  day  we  shall 
know  just  what  combination  of  chemicals  causes  a  human  being 
to  move  this  way  or  that,  to  do  this  thing  or  that.  When  bio- 
chemistry has  progressed  sufficiently,  we  shall  be  able  to  make 
human  qualities,  perhaps  in  the  sperm,  perhaps  in  the  embryo, 
perhaps  day  by  day  by  means  of  diet  or  injection." 

Said  I :  "Some  day,  when  bio-chemistry  has  progressed 
far  enough,  you  will  know  what  combination  of  chemicals 
causes  a  man  to  vote  the  Democratic  or  Republican  ticket." 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  55 

"Why  not?"  answered  my  friend.  (He  has  a  sense  of 
humor  about  all  things  except  this  sacred  bio-chemistry.) 

Said  I :  "When  you  have  got  to  that  stage,  keep  the  secret 
carefully,  and  we  will  fix  up  a  scheme,  and  a  few  days  before 
election  we  will  release  some  gas  in  our  big  cities,  and  sweep 
the  country  for  the  Socialist  ticket." 

But  jesting  aside:  if  the  human  body  is  a  material  thing, 
existing  in  the  material  world  and  subject  to  causation,  there 
must  be  material  reasons  for  the  actions  of  human  bodies, 
just  the  same  as  for  the  moving  of  billiard  balls.  We  hear 
the  sound  of  a  billiard  ball  striking  the  cushion,  and  we  are 
prepared  to  accept  the  idea  that  the  thing  we  call  hearing  in 
us  is  caused  by  the  impinging  of  sound  waves  upon  our  ear- 
drums. And  if  we  investigate  human  beings  in  the  mass,  we 
find  every  reason  to  believe  that  they  act  according  to  laws, 
and  that  there  are  material  causes  for  their  acts.  If  you  get 
up  and  shout  fire  in  a  theater,  you  know  how  the  audience 
will  behave.  If  you  study  statistics,  you  can  say  that  in  any 
large  city  a  certain  fixed  number  of  human  beings  are  going 
to  commit  suicide  every  month;  you  can  even  say  that  more 
are  going  to  commit  suicide  in  the  month  of  June  than  in 
any  other  month.  You  can  say  that  more  people  are  going 
to  die  at  two  o'clock  in  the  morning  than  at  any  other  hour. 
You  know  that  certain  changes  in  the  weather  will  cause  all 
human  beings  to  behave  in  the  same  way.  You  know  that  an 
increase  of  prices  or  an  increase  of  unemployment  will  cause 
a  certain  additional  number  of  men  to  commit  crimes,  and  a 
certain  additional  number  of  women  to  become  prostitutes. 
You  know  that  if  a  man  overeats,  his  thoughts  will  change  their 
color;  he  will  have  what  he  calls  "the  blues."  I  might  cite  a 
thousand  other  illustrations  to  prove  that  human  minds  are 
subject  to  material  laws,  and  therefore  to  investigation  by 
the  bio-chemists. 

But  now,  stop  a  moment.  Here  you  sit  reading  a  book. 
Something  in  the  book  pleases  you,  and  you  say,  "Good!" 
Perhaps  you  slap  your  knee  or  clench  your  fist.  Now  here 
is  a  motion  of  your  hand,  which  stirs  the  air  about  you,  and 
which,  according  to  the  laws  of  energy,  will  spread  its  effects 
to  the  other  side  of  the  world,  and  even  to  the  farthest  of 
the  stars.  Or  perhaps  the  book  makes  you  angry,  and  you 
throw  it  down  in  disgust;  an  entirely  different  motion,  which 
will  affect  the  other  side  of  the  world  and  the  farthest  of  the 


56  Mind  and  Body 

stars  in  an  entirely  different  way.  The  machine  of  the  uni- 
verse will  be  forever  altered  because  of  that  slapping  of  your 
knee  or  that  throwing  down  of  your  book. 

And  what  was  the  cause  of  these  things  ?  So  far  as  we  can 
see,  the  material  cause  was  exactly  the  same  in  each  case — 
the  reading  of  certain  letters.  Two  human  beings,  sitting  side 
by  side  and  reading  exactly  the  same  letters,  might  be  affected 
in  exactly  opposite  ways.  It  seems  hardly  rational  to  main- 
tain that  the  material  difference  of  two  pairs  of  eyes,  moving 
over  exactly  the  same  set  of  letters,  could  have  resulted  in 
two  such  different  motions  of  the  hands.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
the  very  same  letters  may  affect  the  same  person  in  different 
ways.  The  composer,  Edward  MacDowell,  once  told  me  how 
on  his  birthday  his  pupils  sent  him  a  gift,  with  a  card  con- 
taining some  lines  from  the  opera  "Rheingold,"  beginning, 
"O  singe  fort" — that  is,  "Oh,  sing  on."  But  the  composer 
happened,  when  glancing  at  the  card,  to  think  French  instead 
of  German,  and  got  the  message,  "Oh,  powerful  monkey!" 
This,  of  course,  was  disconcerting  to  a  famous  piano  per- 
former, and  his  pupils,  if  they  had  been  watching  his  face, 
would  have  seen  an  unexpected  reaction.  It  seems  manifest, 
does  it  not,  that  the  cause  of  this  difference  of  reaction  was 
not  any  difference  of  the  letters,  but  purely  a  difference  of 
thoughtf  So  it  appears  that  thoughts  may  change  the  mate- 
rial universe;  they  may  break  the  chain  of  causation,  and 
interfere  with  material  events. 

Compare  the  two  things,  a  state  of  consciousness  and  say, 
a  steam  shovel.  They  are  entirely  different,  and  so  far  as  we 
can  see,  entirely  incompatible  and  unrelated.  Can  anyone 
imagine  how  a  thought  can  turn  into  a  steam  shovel,  or  a 
steam  shovel  into  a  thought  ?  We  can  understand  how  a  steam 
shovel  lifts  a  mass  of  earth  out  of  the  ground,  and  we  can 
understand  how  a  human  hand  moves  a  lever  which  causes 
the  shovel  to  act ;  but  we  are  unable  to  conceive  how  a  state 
of  mind — whether  it  be  a  desire  for  pay,  or  an  ideal  of  service, 
or  a  vision  of  the  Panama  Canal — can  so  affect  a  steam  shovel 
as  to  cause  it  to  move.  We  can  sit  and  think  motion  at  a 
billiard  ball  for  a  thousand  years,  and  it  does  not  move;  but 
when  we  think  motion  at  our  hand,  it  moves  instantly,  and 
passes  on  the  motion  to  the  billiard  ball  or  the  steam  shovel. 
When  fire  touches  our  hand  it  sends  some  kind  of  vibration 
to  the  brain,  and  in  some  inconceivable  way  that  vibration  is 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  57 

turned  into  a  state  of  consciousness  called  pain,  and  that  is 
turned,  "as  quick  as  thought,"  into  another  kind  of  motion, 
the  jerking  back  of  our  hand. 

So  it  seems  certain  that  consciousness  really  does  "butt  in" 
on  the  chain  of  natural  causation.  And  yet,  just  see  in  what 
position  this  leaves  the  scientist  who  is  investigating  life  I 
Imagine  if  you  can,  the  plight  of  a  doctor  who  wanted  to 
prescribe  a  diet  for  a  sick  person,  if  he  knew  that  every  piece 
of  chicken  and  every  piece  of  fish  were  free  to  decide  of  its 
own  impulse  whether  or  not  it  would  be  digested  in  the  human 
stomach.  But  the  plight  of  this  doctor  would  be  nothing  to 
the  plight  of  the  chemist  or  the  biologist  or  the  engineer  who 
was  asked  to  do  his  thinking  and  his  planning  in  a  world  con- 
taining a  billion  and  a  quarter  human  beings,  each  one  a  law- 
less agent,  each  one  a  source  of  new  and  unforeseeable  energies,, 
each  one  acting  as  a  "first  cause,"  and  starting  new  chains  of 
activity,  tearing  the  universe  to  pieces  according  to  his  own 
tvhims.  What  kind  of  a  universe  would  that  be?  It  would 
simply  be  a  chaos;  there  could  be  no  thinking,  there  could 
be  no  life  in  it;  there  could  be  no  two  things  the  same  in  it, 
and  no  laws  of  any  sort. 

So  then  we  fall  back  into  the  hands  of  the  "determinists," 
who  assert  one  unbreakable  chain  of  natural  causation,  and 
regard  the  human  body  as  an  automaton.  We  go  back  to  the 
bio-chemist,  who  purposes  some  day  to  ascertain  for  us  just 
exactly  what  molecules  of  matter  in  just  what  positions  and 
combinations  in  the  brain  cells  of  William  Shakespeare  caused 
him  to  perpetrate  a  mixed  metaphor.  We  go  back  to  the 
belief  that  human  beings  act  as  they  must  act.  because  the 
clock  of  life,  wound  up  and  started,  must  move  in  such  and 
such  a  fashion. 

But  now,  let  us  see  what  are  the  implications  of  that 
theory!  Here  am  I  writing  a  book,  appealing  to  men  to  act 
in  certain  ways.  Of  course,  I  know  that  not  all  will  follow 
my  advice.  Some  will  be  foolish — or  what  seems  to  me  foolish. 
Others  will  be  weak,  and  will  resolve  to  act  in  certain  ways, 
and  then  go  and  act  in  other  ways.  But  some  will  be  just ; 
some  will  be  free;  some  will  use  their  brains — because,  you 
see,  I  am  convinced  that  they  can  use  their  brains !  I  am  con- 
vinced that  ideas  will  affect  and  stir  them,  in  complete  defiance 
of  the  bio-chemist,  who  tells  me  that  they  act  that  way  because 
of  certain  chemicals  in  their  brain  cells,  and  that  I  write  my 


58  Mind  and  Body 

book  because  of  other  chemicals,  and  that  my  idea  that  I  am 
writing  the  book  because  I  want  to  write  it  is  a  delusion,  and 
that  the  whole  thing  is  happening  just  so  because  the  universe 
was  wound  up  that  way. 

Now,  this  is  an  unsolved  problem,  and  I  have  no  solution 
to  offer.  What  I  have  set  forth  is  in  substance  one  of  the 
four  "antinomies"  of  Kant,  and  you  can  see  for  yourself  how 
it  is  possible  to  prove  either  side,  and  impossible  to  be  sure  of 
either.  Perhaps  there  is  really  a  duality  in  life.'  Perhaps 
there  are  two  aspects  of  the  universe,  the  material  and  the 
spiritual,  and  perhaps  they  do  not  really  interact  as  they  seem 
to,  but  both  are  guided  and  determined  by  some  higher  reality 
of  life  of  which  we  know  nothing.  In  that  case  there  would 
really  be  a  chemical  equivalent  for  every  thought,  and  there 
would  be  a  trace  of  consciousness  for  every  material  atom 
in  the  universe.  Maybe  the  theologians  are  right,  and  in  the 
universal  consciousness  of  God  the  whole  future  exists  pre- 
determined. Maybe  to  God  there  is  no  such  thing  as  time; 
the  past,  the  present,  and  the  future  are  all  alike  to  Him. 

There  is  nothing  more  painful  to  the  human  mind  than  to 
have  to  confess  its  own  impotence.  Yet  I  can  see  no  escape 
from  the  dilemma  we  are  here  facing.  There  is  not  a  man 
alive  who  does  not  assume  the  freedom  of  the  will,  who  does 
not  show  in  all  his  acts  that  he  agrees  with  old  Dr.  Samuel 
Johnson:  "We  know  we  are  free  and  there's  an  end  on't." 
Without  a  belief  in  freedom  we  cannot  get  beyond  the  animal, 
we  cannot  become  the  masters  of  our  own  souls.  And  yet,  the 
man  who  swallows  that  idea  whole,  and  goes  out  into  the 
world  and  preaches  personal  morality  to  the  neglect  of  the 
fundamental  economic  facts,  the  facts  of  the  body  in  its  rela- 
tionship to  all  other  bodies — we  know  what  happens  to  that 
man;  he  becomes  a  shouting  fool.  Unless  he  is  literally  a 
fool,  or  a  knave,  he  quickly  discovers  his  own  futility,  and 
proceeds  to  use  his  common  sense,  in  spite  of  all  his  theories. 
"Come  to  Jesus !"  cried  William  Booth,  and  he  went  out  in  the 
streets  of  London  to  save  souls  with  a  bass  drum;  but  pres- 
ently, in  day  by  day  contact  with  the  degradation  of  the  Lon- 
don slums,  he  realized  that  he  could  not  save  souls  so  long 
as  those  souls  were  dwelling  in  starved  and  lousy  bodies.  So 
William  Booth  with  his  Salvation  Army  took  to  starting  night 
shelters  and  cast-off  clothing  bureaus! 

And  of  exactly  the  same  sort  is  the  bewilderment  which 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  59 

falls  to  tlie  lot  of  the  scientist  who  is  honest  and  willing  to 
face  the  facts.  The  bio-chemist  with  his  test  tubes  and  his 
microscopes  and  his  complex  apparatus  of  research  sits  him- 
self down  and  accumulates  a  mass  of  information  about  the 
human  body.  He  investigates  the  diseases  of  the  body  and 
learns  in  detail  just  how  these  diseases  spread  and  sometimes 
how  they  are  caused;  he  can  present  you  with  a  diagnosis, 
showing  the  exact  stage  to  which  the  degeneration  of  a  cer- 
tain organ  has  proceeded,  and  perhaps  he  can  suggest  to  you 
a  change  of  diet  or  some  drug  which  will,  for  a  time  at  least, 
check  the  process  of  the  breakdown.  But  in  other  cases  he  will 
be  perfectly  helpless ;  he  will  be,  as  it  were,  buried  under  the 
mass  of  detail  which  he  has  accumulated ;  he  will  find  the  vital 
energy  depressed,  and  he  will  not  know  any  way  to  renew  it. 
But  along  will  come  some  mental  specialist,  who  in  a  half 
hour's  talk  with  the  patient,  by  a  simple  change  in  the  patient's 
ideas,  will  completely  make  over  the  patient's  life,  and  set 
going  a  new  vital  process  which  will  restore  the  body  to  its 
former  health-  A  religious  enthusiast  may  do  this,  a  psycho- 
therapist may  do  it,  a  moral  genius  may  do  it ;  and  the  physi- 
cian with  all  his  learning  will  find  himself  like  a  man  on  the 
outside  of  a  house,  peering  in  through  the  windows  and  trying 
in  vain  to  find  out  something  about  the  life  of  the  family  and 
its  guests. 

This  is  humiliating  to  the  chemist  and  the  medical  man,  but 
they  have  to  face  it,  because  it  is  a  fact.  In  the  seat  of  author- 
ity over  the  human  body  there  sits  a  higher  being  which,  with- 
out any  religious  implications,  we  may  call  the  soul ;  or,  if  it  is 
impossible  to  get  away  from  the  religious  implication  of  that 
word,  we  will  call  it  the  consciousness,  or  the  personality. 
This  master  of  the  house  of  life  is  in  many  ways  dependent 
upon  the  house.  If  the  furnace  goes  out  he  freezes,  and  if 
the  house  takes  fire  and  bums  up — well,  he  disappears  and 
leaves  no  address.  But  in  other  ways  the  master  of  the  house 
is  really  master,  and  is  a  worker  of  miracles.  He  does  things 
which  we  do  not  at  all  understand,  and  cannot  yet  even  foresee, 
but  which  often  completely  make  the  house  over. 

William  James,  a  scientist  of  real  authority,  has  a  wonder- 
ful essay,  **The  Powers  of  Men,"  in  which  he  sets  forth  the 
fact  that  human  beings  as  a  general  rule  make  use  of  only  a 
small  portion  of  the  energies  which  dwell  in  their  beings,  and 
that  one  of  our  problems  is  to  find  the  ways  by  which  we  can 


60  Mind  and  Body 

draw  upon  stores  of  hidden  energy  which  we  have  within  us. 
Also,  in  a  fascinating  book,  "Varieties  of  the  Rehgious 
Experience,"  James  has  endeavored  to  study  and  analyze  the 
phenomena  which  hitherto  the  physician  and  the  biologist  have 
been  disposed  to  ridicule  and  neglect.  But  unless  I  am  mis- 
taken, every  scientist  in  the  end  will  be  forced  to  come  back  to 
the  central  fact,  that  life  is  a  unity,  and  that  the  heart  of  it  is 
the  spirit ;  that  what  we  call  the  will  is  not  an  accident,  not  a 
delusion,  not  some  by-product  of  nature,  but  is  the  very  secret 
of  life ;  and  that  behind  it  is  a  vast  ocean  of  power,  which  now 
and  then  sweeps  away  all  dykes,  and  floods  into  the  human 
consciousness. 

The  writer  of  this  book  is  now  a  patient  and  plodding 
teacher  of  a  certain  economic  doctrine,  a  preacher  of  what  he 
might  call  anti-parasitism.  He  has  come  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  habit  of  men  to  enslave  their  fellows  and  exploit  them  and 
draw  their  substance  from  them  without  return — ^that  this 
habit  is  destructive  to  all  civilization,  and  is  incompatible  with 
any  of  the  higher  forms  of  life,  intellectual,  moral  or  artistic. 
He  has  come  to  the  conclusion  that  there  is  no  use  attempting 
to  build  a  structure  of  social  life  until  there  is  a  sound  founda- 
tion ;  in  other  words,  until  the  capitalist  system  has  been  re- 
placed by  cooperation.  But  in  his  youth  he  was,  or  thought 
he  was,  a  poet,  and  touched  upon  that  strange  and  wonderful 
thing  which  we  call  genius.  He  saw  his  own  consciousness,  as 
it  were  a  leaf  driven  before  a  mighty  tempest  of  spiritual 
energy.  And  he  believes  that  this  experience  was  no  delusion, 
but  was  a  revelation  of  the  hidden  mysteries  of  being.  He 
still  has  memories  of  this  startling  experience,  still  hints  of  it 
in  his  consciousness ;  something  still  leaps  in  his  memory,  like 
a  race-horse,  or  like  the  war-horse  of  Revelations,  which 
"scenteth  the  battle  afar  off,  the  thunder  of  the  captains  and 
the  shouting."  Because  of  these  things  he  can  never  accept 
any  philosophy  which  shackles  the  human  spirit,  he  will  never 
in  his  thought  attempt  to  set  bounds  to  the  possibilities  of 
human  life.  The  very  heart  of  life  beats  in  us,  the  wonder  of 
it  and  the  glory  of  it  swells  like  a  tide  behind  us.  New  uni- 
verses are  born  in  us,  or,  if  you  prefer,  they  are  made  by  us ; 
and  the  process  is  one  of  endless  joy,  of  rapture  beyond  any- 
thing that  the  average  man  can  at  present  imagine,  or  that 
any  instruments  invented  by  science  can  weigh  or  measure. 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE    MIND    OF    THE    BODY 

(Discusses  the  subconscious  mind,  what  it  is,  what  it  does  to 
the  body,  and  how  it  can  be  controlled  and  made  use  of  by  the 
intelligence.) 

The  importance  of  the  mind  in  matters  of  health  be- 
comes clearer  when  we  understand  that  what  we  commonly 
call  our  minds — the  mental  states  which  confront  us  day  by 
day  in  our  consciousness — are  really  but  a  small  portion  of 
ouf  total  mind.  In  addition  to  this  conscious  mind  there  is  an 
enormous  mass  of  our  personality  which  is  like  a  storehouse 
attached  to  our  dwelling,  a  place  to  which  we  do  not  often  go, 
but  to  which  we  can  go  in  case  of  need.  This  storehouse  is 
our  memory,  the  things  we  know  and  can  recall  at  will.  And 
then  there  is  another,  still  vaster  storehouse — no  one  has  ever 
measured  or  guessed  the  size  of  it — ^which  apparently  contains 
everything  that  we  have  ever  known,  perhaps  also  everything 
that  our  ancestors  have  known.  A  common  simile  for  the 
human  mind  is  that  of  an  iceberg;  a  certain  portion  of  it 
appears  above  the  surface  of  the  sea,  but  there  is  seven  times 
as  much  of  it  floating  out  of  sight  under  the  water. 

This  subconscious  mind  seems  to  be  the  portion  most 
closely  united  with  the  body.  It  has  its  seat  in  the  back  parts 
of  the  brain,  in  the  spinal  cord  and  the  greater  nervous  ganglia, 
such  as  the  solar  plexus.  It  is  the  portion  of  our  mind  which 
controls  the  activities  of  our  body,  all  those  miraculous  things 
which  went  on  before  we  first  opened  our  eyes  to  the  light, 
and  which  go  on  while  we  sleep,  and  never  cease  until  we  die. 
When  we  cut  our  finger  and  admit  foreign  germs  to  our 
blood,  some  mysterious  power  causes  millions  of  our  blood 
corpuscles  to  be  rushed  to  this  spot,  to  destroy  and  devour  the 
invading  enemy.  We  do  not  know  how  this  is  done,  but  it  is 
an  intelligent  act,  measured  and  precisely  regulated,  as  much  so 
as  a  railroad  time-table.  When  the  supply  of  nourishment  in 
the  body  becomes  low,  something  issues  a  notice  by  way  of  our 
stomach,  which  we  call  hunger;  when  we  take  food  into  the 
stomach,  something  pours  out  the  gastric  juice  to  digest  it; 
when  this  digested  food  is  prepared  and  taken  up  in  the  blood 

61 


62  Mind  and  Body 

stream,  something  decides  what  portion  of  it  shall  be  turned 
into  muscle,  what  into  brain  cells,  what  into  hair,  what  into 
finger  nails.  Sometimes,  of  course,  mistakes  are  made  and  we 
have  diseases.  But  for  the  most  part  all  this  infinitely  intricate 
process  goes  on  day  and  night  without  a  1": '  tch,  and  it  is  all  the 
work  of  what  we  might  call  "the  mind  of  ihe  body." 

And  just  as  our  material  bodies  are  the  product  of  an 
age-long  process  of  development  repeated  in  embryo  by  every 
individual,  so  is  this  mental  life  a  product  of  long  development, 
and  carries  memories  of  this  far-ofl  process.  In  our  instincts 
there  dwells  all  the  past,  not  merely  of  the  human  race,  but  of 
all  life,  and  if  we  should  ever  succeed  in  completely  probing 
the  subconscious  mind  and  bringing  it  into  our  consciousness, 
it  would  be  the  same  as  if  we  were  free  to  ramble  about  in  all 
the  past.  Huxley  set  forth  the  fact  that  all  the  history  of 
evolution  is  told  in  a  piece  of  chalk;  and  we  probably  do  not 
exaggerate  in  saying  that  all  the  history  of  the  universe  is  in 
the  subconscious  mind  of  every  human  being.  When  the  par- 
tridge which  has  just  come  out  of  the  egg  sees  the  shadow  of 
the  hawk  flit  by  and  crouches  motionless  as  a  leaf,  the  partridge 
is  not  acting  upon  any  knowledge  which  it  has  acquired  in  the 
few  minutes  since  it  was  hatched.  It  is  acting  upon  a  knowl- 
edge impressed  upon  its  subconscious  mind  by  the  experience 
of  millions  of  partridges,  perhaps  for  tens  of  thousands  of 
years.  When  the  physician  lifts  the  newly  born  infant  by  its 
ankle  and  spanks  it  to  make  it  cry,  the  physician  is  using  his 
conscious  reason,  because  he  has  learned  from  previous  expe- 
rience, or  has  been  taught  in  the  schools  that  it  is  necessary  for 
the  child's  breathing  apparatus  to  be  instantly  cleared.  But 
when  the  child  responds  to  the  spanking  with  a  yell,  it  is  not 
moved  by  reasoned  indignation  at  an  undeserved  injury;  it  is 
following  an  automatic  reaction,  as  a  result  of  the  experience 
of  infants  in  the  stone  age,  experience  which  in  some  obscure 
way  has  been  registered  and  stored  in  the  infant  cerebellum. 

Science  is  now  groping  its  way  through  this  underworld  of 
thought.  Obviously  we  should  have  here  a  most  powerful 
means  of  influencing  the  body,  if  by  any  chance  we  could  con- 
trol it.  We  are  continually  seeking  in  medical  and  surgical 
ways  to  stimulate  or  to  retard  activities  of  the  body,  which  are 
controlled  entirely  by  this  subconscious  mind.  If  we  are  suf- 
fering intense  pain  in  a  joint,  we  put  on  a  mustard  plaster, 
what  we  call  a  counter-irritant,  to  trouble  the  skin  and  draw 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  63 

the  congested  blood  away  from  the  place  of  the  pain.  On  the 
other  hand,  we  may  stimulate  the  functions  of  the  intestines 
by  the  application  of  hot  fomentations,  to  bring  the  blood  more 
actively  to  that  region.  But  if  by  any  means  we  could  make 
clear  our  wishes  to  the  subconscious  mind,  we  should  be  deal- 
ing with  headquarters,  and  should  get  quicker  and  more 
permanent  results. 

Can  we  by  any  possibility  do  this?  To  begin  with,  let  me 
tell  you  of  a  simple  experiment  that  I  have  witnessed.  I  once 
knew  a  man  who  had  learned  to  control  the  circulation  of  his 
blood  by  his  conscious  will.  I  have  seen  him  lay  his  two 
hands  on  the  table,  both  of  the  same  color,  and  without  moving 
the  hands,  cause  one  hand  to  turn  red  and  the  other  to  turn 
pale.  And,  obviously,  so  far  as  this  man  is  concerned,  the 
problem  of  counter-irritants  has  been  solved.  He  is  a  mental 
mustard  plaster. 

And  what  was  done  by  this  man's  own  will  can  be  done  to 
others  in  many  ways.  The  most  obvious  is  a  device  which  we 
call  hypnotism.  This  is  a  kind  of  sleep  which  affects  only  the 
conscious  control  of  the  body,  but  leaves  all  the  senses  awake. 
In  this  hypnotic  sleep  or  "trance"  we  discover  that  the  sub- 
conscious mind  is  a  good  deal  like  the  Henry  Dubb  of  the 
Socialist  cartoons ;  it  is  faithful  and  persistent,  very  strong  in 
its  own  limited  field,  but  comically  credulous,  willing  to  believe 
anything  that  is  told  it,  and  to  take  orders  from  any  one  who 
climbs  into  the  seat  of  authority.  You  have  perhaps  attended 
one  of  the  exhibitions  which  traveling  hypnotists  are  accus- 
tomed to  give  in  country  villages.  You  have  seen  some  bump- 
kin brought  upon  the  stage  and  hypnotized,  and  told  that  he  is 
in  the  water  and  must  swim  for  his  life,  or  that  he  is  in  the 
midst  of  a  hornets'  nest,  or  that  his  trousers  are  torn  in  the 
seat — any  comical  thing  that  will  cause  an  audience  to  howl 
with  laughter. 

These  facts  were  first  discovered  nearly  a  hundred  and 
fifty  years  ago  by  a  French  doctor  named  Mesmer.  He  was  a 
good  deal  of  a  charlatan,  and  would  not  reveal  his  secrets,  and 
probably  the  scientific  men  of  that  time  were  glad  to  despise 
him,  because  what  he  did  was  so  new  and  strange.  There  is  a 
certain  type  of  scientific  mind  which  sits  aloft  on  a  throne  with 
a  framed  diploma  above  its  head,  and  says  that  what  it  knows 
is  science  and  what  it  does  not  know  is  nonsense.  And  so 
"mesmerism"  was  left  for  the  quacks  and  traveling  showmen. 


64  Mind  and  Body 

But  half  a  century  later  a  French  physician  named  Liebault 
took  up  this  method  of  hypnotism,  without  all  the  fakery  that 
had  been  attached  to  it.  He  experimented  and  discovered  that 
he  could  cure  not  merely  phobias  and  manias,  fixed  ideas,  hys- 
terias and  melancholias;  he  could  cure  definite  physical  dis- 
eases of  the  physical  body,  such  as  headache,  rheumatism,  and 
hemorrhage.  Later  on  two  other  physicians,  Janet  and  Char- 
cot, developed  definite  schools  of  "psychotherapy."  They 
rejected  hypnotism  as  in  most  cases  too  dangerous,  but  used  a 
milder  form  which  is  known  as  "hypnoidization."  You  would 
be  surprised  to  know  how  many  ailments  which  baffle  the  skill 
of  medical  men  and  surgeons  yield  completely  to  a  single  brief 
treatment  by  such  a  mental  specialist. 

All  that  is  necessary  is  some  method  to  tap  the  subconscious 
mind.  In  many  cases  the  subconsciousness  knows  what  is 
the  matter,  and  will  tell  at  once — a  secret  that  is  completely 
hidden  from  the  consciousness.  For  example,  a  man's  hands 
shake;  they  have  been  shaking  for  years,  and  he  has  no  idea 
why,  but  his  subconscious  mind  explains  that  they  first  began 
to  shake  with  grief  over  the  death  of  his  wife ;  also,  the  sub- 
conscious mind  meekly  and  instantly  accepts  the  suggestion 
that  the  time  for  grief  is  past,  and  that  the  hands  will  never 
shake  again. 

Or  here  is  a  woman  who  has  become  convinced  that 
worms  are  crawling  all  over  her.  Everything  that  touches  her 
becomes  a  worm,  even  the  wrinkles  in  her  dress  are  worms, 
and  she  is  wild  with  nervousness,  and  of  course  is  on  the  way 
to  the  lunatic  asylum.  She  is  hypnotized  and  sees  the  operator 
catching  these  worms  one  by  one  and  killing  them.  She  is  told 
that  he  has  killed  the  last,  but  she  insists,  "No,  there  is  one 
more."  The  operator  clutches  that  one,  and  she  is  perfectly 
satisfied,  and  completely  cured.  Her  husband  writes,  express- 
ing his  relief  that  he  no  longer  has  to  "sleep  every  night  in  a 
fish  pond."  This  instance  with  many  others  is  told  by  Pro- 
fessor Quackenbos  in  his  book,  "Hypnotic  Therapeutics." 

Among  the  most  powerful  means  to  influence  the  subcon- 
scious personality  is  religious  excitement.  Religion  has  come 
down  to  us  from  ancient  times,  and  its  fears  and  ecstasies  are 
a  part  of  our  instinctive  endowment.  Those  who  can  sway 
religious  emotions  can  cure  disease,  not  merely  fixed  ideas,  but 
many  diseases  which  appear  to  be  entirely  physical,  but  which 
psycho-analysis  reveals  to  be  hysterical  in  nature.    Of  course 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  65 

these  religious  persons  who  heal  by  laying  on  of  hands  or  by 
purely  mental  means  deny  indignantly  that  they  are  using  hyp- 
notism or  anything  like  it.  I  am  aware  that  I  shall  bring  upon 
myself  a  flood  of  letters  from  Christian  Scientists  if  I  identify 
their  methods  of  curing  with  "animal  magnetism"  and  "ma- 
nipulation," and  other  devices  of  the  devil  which  they  repu- 
diate. All  I  can  say  is  that  their  miracles  are  brought  about 
by  affecting  the  subconscious  mind ;  there  is  no  other  way  to 
bring  them  about,  and  for  my  part  I  cannot  see  that  it  makes 
a  great  difference  whether  the  subconscious  mind  is  affected 
by  a  hand  laid  on  the  forehead,  or  by  a  hand  waved  in  the  air, 
or  by  an  incantation  pronounced,  or  by  a  prayer  thought  in 
silence.  If  you  can  persuade  the  subconscious  mind  that  God 
is  operating  upon  it,  that  God  is  omnipotent  and  is  directing 
this  particular  healing,  that  is  the  most  powerful  suggestion 
imaginable,  and  is  the  basis  of  many  cures.  But  if  in  order  to 
achieve  this,  it  is  necessary  for  me  to  persuade  myself  that  I 
can  find  some  meaning  in  the  metaphysical  moonshine  of 
Mother  Eddy — why,  then,  I  am  very  sprry,  but  I  really  prefer 
to  remain  sick. 

But  such  is  not  the  case.  You  do  not  have  to  believe  any- 
thing that  is  not  true;  you  simply  have  to  understand  the 
machinery  of  the  subconscious,  and  how  to  ope  rat  e  it.  We  are 
only  beginning  to  acquire  that  knowledge,  and  we  need  an 
open  mind,  free  both  from  the  dogmatism  of  the  medical  men 
and  the  fanaticism  of  the  "faith  curists."  A  few  years  ago  in 
London  I  met  a  number  of  people  who  were  experimenting  in 
an  entirely  open-minded  way  with  mental  healing,  and  I  was 
interested  in  their  ideas.  I  happened  to  be  traveling  on  the 
Continent,  and  on  the  train  my  wife  was  seized  by  a  very 
dreadful  headache.  She  was  lying  with  her  head  in  my  lap, 
suffering  acutely,  and  I  thought  I  would  try  an  experiment,  so 
I  put  my  hand  upon  her  forehead,  without  telling  her  what  I 
was  doing,  and  concentrated  my  attention  with  the  greatest 
possible  intensity  upon  her  headache.  I  had  an  idea  of  the 
cause  of  it;  I  understood  that  headaches  are  caused  by  the 
irritation  of  the  sensory  nerves  of  the  brain  by  fatigue  poisons, 
or  other  waste  matter  which  the  blood  has  not  been  able  to 
eliminate.  I  formed  in  my  mind  a  vivid  picture  of  what  the 
blood  would  have  to  do  to  relieve  that  headache,  and  I  concen- 
trated my  mental  energies  upon  the  command  to  her  subcon- 
scious mind  that  it  should  perform  these  particular  functions. 


66  Mind  and  Body 

In  a  few  minutes  my  wife  sat  up  with  a  look  of  great  surprise 
on  her  face  and  said,  "Why,  my  headache  is  gone !  It  went  all 
at  once!" 

That,  of  course,  might  have  been  a  coincidence ;  but  I  tried 
the  experiment  many  times,  and  it  happened  over  and  over. 
On  another  occasion  I  was  able  to  cure  the  pain  of  an  ulcer- 
ated tooth ;  I  was  able  to  cure  it  half  a  dozen  times,  but  never 
permanently,  it  always  returned,  and  finally  the  tooth  had  to 
come  out.  My  wife  experimented  with  me  in  the  same  way, 
and  found  that  she  was  able  to  cure  an  attack  of  dyspepsia; 
but,  curiously  enough,  she  at  once  gave  herself  a  case  of  dys- 
pepsia— something  she  had  never  known  in  her  life  before. 
So  now  I  will  not  allow  her  to  experiment  with  me,  and  she 
will  not  allow  me  to  experiment  with  her!  But  we  are  quite 
sure  that  people  with  psychic  gifts  can  definitely  affect  the 
subconscious  mind  of  others  by  purely  mental  means.  We  are 
prepared  to  believe  in  the  miracles  of  the  New  Testament,  and 
in  the  wonders  of  Lourdes,  as  well  as  in  the  healings  of  the 
Christian  Scientists  and  the  New  Thoughters,  which  cannot  be 
disputed  by  any  one  who  is  willing  to  take  the  trouble  to  inves- 
tigate. We  can  face  these  facts  without  losing  our  reason, 
without  ceasing  to  believe  that  everything  in  life  has  a  cause, 
and  that  we  can  find  out  this  cause  if  we  investigate 
thoroughly. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

EXPLORING    THE    SUBCONSCIOUS 

(Discusses  automatic  writing,  the  analysis  of  dreams,  and 
other  methods  by  which  a  whole  new  universe  of  life  has  been 
brought  to  human  knowledge.) 

One  of  the  most  common  methods  of  exploring  the  sub- 
conscious mind  is  the  method  of  automatic  writing.  I  have 
never  tried  this  myself,  but  tens  of  thousands  of  people  are 
sitting  every  night  with  a  "ouija"  in  front  of  them,  holding  a 
pencil  on  a  piece  of  paper  and  letting  their  subconscious  minds 
write  what  they  please.  Most  of  them  are  hoping  to  get  mes- 
sages from  the  dead — a  problem  which  we  shall  discuss  in  the 
next  chapter.  Suffice  it  for  the  moment  to  say  that  automatic 
writing  and  table  rapping  and  other  devices  of  mediumship 
have  opened  up  to  us  a  vast  mass  of  subconscious  mentality. 
A  part  of  the  scientific  world  still  takes  a  contemptuous  atti- 
tude and  calls  this  all  humbug,  but  many  of  our  greatest  scien- 
tists have  been  persuaded  to  investigate,  and  have  become  con- 
vinced that  in  this  mass  of  subconsciousness  there  is  mingled, 
not  merely  the  mind  of  the  medium,  but  the  minds  of  all  those 
present,  and  possibly  other  minds  as  well.  For  my  part,  I  do 
not  see  how  any  one  can  study  disinterestedly  the  proceedings 
of  the  Society  for  Psychical  Research  and  not  become  con- 
vinced that  telepathy  at  least  is  one  of  the  powers  of  the  sub- 
conscious mind. 

Telepathy  is  what  is  popularly  known  as  "thought  trans- 
mission." Every  one  must  know  people  who  are  what  is  called 
"psychic,"  and  will  know  what  is  happening  to  some  friend  in 
another  part  of  the  world,  or  will  go  upstairs  because  they 
"sense"  that  some  one  wants  them,  or  will  go  to  the  door 
because  they  "have  a  hunch"  that  some  one  is  coming.  And 
maybe  these  things  are  only  chance,  but  you  will  be  unscientific 
if  you  do  not  take  the  trouble  to  read  and  learn  what  modern 
investigators  have  brought  out  on  such  subjects. 

This  much  is  certain,  and  is  denied  by  no  competent  investi- 
gator :  whatever  has  been  in  your  mind  is  there  still,  and  it  is 
possible  to  find  a  way  of  tapping  the  buried  memory.    An  old 

67 


68  Mind  and  Body 

woman,  delirious  with  fever,  begins  to  babble  in  a  strange 
language,  and  it  is  discovered  that  she  is  talking  ancient 
Hebrew.  The  woman  is  entirely  illiterate,  and  her  conscious 
memory  knows  no  language  but  her  own,  her  conscious  mind 
has  no  ideas  beyond  those  of  her  domestic  life  and  the 
gossip  of  the  village.  But  investigation  is  made,  and  it  is 
discovered  that  when  this  woman  was  a  girl,  she  worked  in 
the  home  of  a  Hebrew  scholar,  and  heard  him  reading  aloud. 
She  did  not  understand  a  word  of  what  she  heard,  and  was  not 
consciously  listening  to  it ;  nevertheless,  every  syllable  of  it  had 
been  stored  away  forever  by  her  subconscious  mind.  Innu- 
merable cases  of  this  sort  have  been  established;  and,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  we  might  have  been  prepared  for  such  dis- 
coveries by  the  memory-feats  of  the  conscious  mind.  It  is 
well  known  that  Mozart,  when  a  child,  could  listen  to  a  new 
opera,  and  go  home  and  play  it  over  note  for  note.  At  present 
there  is  a  child  in  America,  giving  exhibitions  in  public,  carry- 
ing on  thirty  games  of  chess  at  the  same  time.  There  have 
been  others  who  do  sums  of  mental  arithmetic,  such  as  multi- 
plying thirty-two  figures  by  thirty-two  figures,  or  reciting  the 
Bible  backwards. 

All  this  seems  incredible;  and  yet  there  is  something  still 
more  incredible.  Suppose  that  these  same  powers,  which  are 
stored  in  our  subconscious  minds,  were  stored  also  in  the  minds 
of  animals !  A  few  years  ago  Maurice  Maeterlinck  pubhshed 
a  book,  "The  Unknown  Guest,"  in  the  course  of  which  he  tells 
about  his  experiments  with  the  so-called  Elberf eld  horses :  two 
animals  which  had  been  trained  for  years  by  their  owner  to 
give  signals  by  moving  their  forefeet,  and  which  apparently 
could  count  and  divide  and  multiply  large  sums,  and  extract 
square  and  cube  root,  and  spell  out  names,  and  recognize 
sounds,  scents  and  colors,  and  read  time  from  the  face  of  a 
watch.  Of  course,  it  is  easy  to  say  that  this  is  absurd,  that 
the  horses  must  have  got  some  signals  from  their  trainer ;  but, 
as  it  happened,  they  would  do  their  work  in  the  absence  of 
their  trainer;  they  would  do  it  in  the  dark,  or  with  a  sack 
over  their  heads,  and  the  best  scientific  minds  of  Germany  were 
unable  to  suggest  any  test  conditions  which  could  not  be  met. 
There  have  been  many  gigantic  frauds  in  the  world,  and  this 
may  have  been  one  of  them;  on  the  other  hand,  there  have 
been  many  new  discoveries,  and  for  my  part  I  will  finish 
exploring  the  miracles  of   the   subconscious  mind   of  man, 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  69 

before  I  presume  to  say  that  anything  is  impossible  in  the  sub- 
conscious mind  of  a  horse  or  a  dog.  Also  I  will  wait  for  some 
learned  person  to  explain  to  me  how  the  subconscious  minds 
of  horses  and  dogs  know  enough  to  build  and  repair  their 
bones  and  teeth,  so  cleverly  that  modem  architectural  and  engi- 
neering science  could  teach  them  nothing.  I  ask,  also,  if  it  is 
possible  to  find  a  region  in  the  subconsciousness  which  is  com- 
mon to  two  people,  why  is  it  absurd  to  suggest  that  there  might 
be  a  region  common  to  a  man  and  a  horse?  Why  is  this  any 
more  absurd  than  that  they  should  eat  the  same  food  and 
breathe  the  same  air  and  feel  the  same  affection  and  be 
frightened  at  the  same  dangers? 

The  only  persons  who  will  be  dogmatic  about  such  subjects 
are  the  persons  who  are  ignorant.  Those  who  take  the  trouble 
to  investigate,  discover  more  wonderful  things  every  day,  and 
they  realize  that  we  have  here  a  whole  universe  of  knowledge, 
to  which  we  have  as  yet  barely  opened  the  doors.  GDnsider, 
for  example,  the  facts  which  we  are  acquiring  on  the  subject 
of  personality  and  what  it  means.  You  would  say,  perhaps, 
that  if  there  is  anything  you  know  positively,  it  is  that  you  are 
one  person,  and  have  never  been  anybody  else,  and  that  your 
body  belongs  to  you,  and  that  nobody  else  ever  has  used  or  ever 
can  use  it.  But  what  would  you  say  if  I  told  you  that  tomor- 
row "you"  might  cease  to  be,  and  somebody  else  might  be  in 
possession  of  your  body,  walking  it  around  and  wearing  its 
clothes  and  spending  its  money?  What  if  I  were  to  tell  you 
that  there  might  be  in  "you,"  or  in  your  body,  half  a  dozen 
diflferent  personalities  which  you  have  never  known  or  dreamed 
of,  and  that  tomorrow  there  might  break  out  a  war  between 
them  and  "you,"  as  to  which  of  the  half  dozen  people  should 
hear  with  your  ears  and  speak  with  your  tongue  and  walk 
about  with  your  clothes  on  ?  Unless  you  are  familiar  with  the 
literature  of  multiple  personality,  you  would  surely  say  that 
this  was  unbelievable — quite  as  much  so  as  a  mathematical 
horse ! 

Let  us  begin  with  the  case  of  the  Reverend  Ansel  Bourne, 
who  was  many  years  ago  a  perfectly  respectable  clergyman  in 
a  Rhode  Island  town.  One  day  he  disappeared,  and  his  family 
did  not  hear  of  him,  A  year  or  two  later  there  was  a  store- 
keeper in  a  town  in  Pennsylvania,  who  suddenly  came  to  him- 
self as  the  Reverend  Ansel  Bourne,  not  knowing  what  he  had 
been  in  the  meantime,  or  how  he  came  to  be  keeping  a  store. 


70  Mind  and  Body 

Under  hypnotism  it  developed  that  he  had  in  him  two  per- 
sonaHties,  and  his  trance  personaHty  recollected  all  that  had 
been  happening  in  the  meantime  and  told  about  it  freely. 

Or  take  the  still  more  fascinating  case  of  the  young  lady 
who  is  known  in  the  literature  of  psychotherapy  as  Miss  Beau- 
champ.  Her  story  is  told  in  a  book,  "The  Dissociation  of  a 
Personality,"  by  Dr.  Morton  Prince  of  Boston.  Some  thirty 
years  ago  Miss  Beauchamp,  a  very  conscientious  and  dignified 
young  lady,  became  nervous  and  ill,  and  took  to  doing  strange 
things,  which  were  a  source  of  shame  and  humiliation  to  her. 
Under  hypnotism  it  was  discovered  to  be  a  case  of  multiple 
personality.  The  other  personality,  who  finally  gave  herself 
the  name  of  Sally,  was  entirely  different  in  character  from 
Miss  Beauchamp,  being  mischievous,  vain,  and  primitive  as  a 
child.  She  conceived  an  intense  dislike  for  Miss  Beauchamp, 
whom  she  called  by  abusive  names ;  at  times  when  she  could 
get  possession  of  Miss  Beauchamp's  body,  she  delighted  in 
playing  humiliating  tricks  upon  her  enemy,  spending  her 
money,  running  her  into  debt,  breaking  her  engagements,  dis- 
gracing her  before  her  friends.  Sally  was  always  well  and 
Miss  Beauchamp  was  always  ill,  and  Sally  would  take  the 
body,  for  which  they  fought  for  possession,  and  take  it  for 
long  and  exhausting  walks,  and  leave  it  cold  and  miserable, 
lost  and  penniless,  in  the  possession  of  Miss  Beauchamp !  And 
of  course  this  made  Miss  Beauchamp  more  and  more  a  wreck, 
and  Sally  took  possession  of  more  and  more  of  her  time. 
Sally  knew  everything  that  Miss  Beauchamp  did  and  thought, 
but  Miss  Beauchamp  did  not  know  about  Sally.  She  only 
knew  that  there  were  gaps  in  her  life,  during  which  she  did 
things  she  could  not  explain.  And  because  she  did  not  want 
her  friends  to  think  her  insane,  she  would  try  to  hide  this 
dreadful  condition  of  affairs;  but  Sally  would  spoil  her  plans 
by  writing'  letters  to  her  friends,  and  also  by  writing  insulting 
letters  for  Miss  Beauchamp  to  find  when  she  took  possession 
again. 

Then  one  day,  after  several  years  of  treatment,  there 
appeared  yet  another  personality,  who  knew  nothing  about 
Miss  Beauchamp  or  Sally  either,  and  only  knew  what  Miss 
Beauchamp  had  known  up  to  some  years  before.  Miss  Beau- 
champ had  a  college  education,  and  wrote  and  spoke  French; 
Sally  knew  no  French,  and  tried  in  vain  to  learn  it ;  the  new 
personality  did  not  have  a  college  education  at  all.    Neverthe- 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  71 

less,  after  long  experiment,  the  story  of  which  is  as  fascinating 
as  any  novel  you  ever  read,  Dr.  Prince  discovered  that  this  was 
the  real  Miss  Beauchamp;  the  others  were  "split  off"  per- 
sonalities. He  traced  the  cause  to  a  severe  mental  shock,  and 
succeeded  in  the  end  in  combining  the  first  Miss  Beauchamp 
with  the  last,  and  in  suppressing  the  obstinate  and  wanton 
Sally.  As  you  read  this  story,  you  watch  him  mentally  mur- 
dering a  human  being;  "Sally"  clamors  pitifully  for  life,  but 
he  condemns  her  to  death,  and  relentlessly  executes  his  sen- 
tence. It  is  a  "movie"  thriller  with  a  happy  ending,  and  I 
should  think  it  would  make  disconcerting  reading  to  persons 
who  believe  that  each  of  us  is  one  immortal  soul,  or  "has"  one 
immortal  soul,  and  is  responsible  for  it  to  a  personal  God. 

There  is  never  any  end  to  the  problems  of  these  multiple 
personalities,  and  each  case  is  a  test  of  the  judgment  and 
ingenuity  of  the  specialist.  He  will  try  to  make  one  personality 
"stick,"  and  will  fail,  and  will  have  to  accept  another,  or  a  com- 
bination of  two.  In  one  case,  he  found  that  he  could  not  get 
the  right  personality  to  "stick"  except  under  hypnosis,  so  he 
decided  to  leave  the  man  in  a  mild  state  of  trance,  and  the  new 
personality  lived  all  the  rest  of  its  life  in  that  condition.  If 
you  wish  to  know  more  about  this  subject  you  can  find  books 
in  any  well-equipped  library.  I  mention  one,  "The  Riddle  of 
Personality,"  by  H.  Addington  Bruce,  because  it  contains  in 
the  appendix  an  excellent  list  of  the  literature  of  the  subcon- 
scious in  all  its  many  aspects. 

There  is  another,  and  most  fascinating  method  of  exploring 
this  underworld  of  the  mind,  and  that  is  the  study  of  dreams. 
Some  fifteen  years  ago  a  psychotherapist  in  New  York  told 
me  about  the  discoveries  of  a  physician  in  Vienna,  and  gave  me 
some  pamphlets,  written  in  very  difficult  and  technical  Ger- 
man. Since  then  this  Professor  Freud  has  been  translated, 
and  has  become  a  fad,  and  the  absurdities  of  his  followers 
make  one  a  little  apologetic  for  him.  But  we  do  not  give  up 
Jesus  because  of  the  torturers  and  bigots  who  call  themselves 
Christians,  and  in  the  same  way  we  have  no  right  to  blame 
Freud  for  all  the  absurdities  of  the  psychoanalysts. 

Probably  there  never  was  a  time  in  human  history  when 
there  were  not  people  who  interpreted  dreams,  and  you  can 
still  buy  "dream  books"  for  twenty-five  cents,  and  learn  that 
a  white  horse  means  that  you  are  going  to  get  a  letter  from 
your  sweetheart  tomorrow;  then  you  can  buy  another  dream 


72  Mind  and  Body 

book,  telling  you  that  a  white  horse  means  there  is  going  to 
be  a  death  in  your  family  within  the  year.  Naturally  this 
prejudices  thinking  people  against  dream  analysis ;  yet,  dreams 
are  facts,  and  every  fact  has  its  cause,  and  if  you  dream  about 
a  white  horse,  there  must  assuredly  be  some  reason  for  your 
dreaming  this  particular  thing.  Of  course  we  know  that  if 
you  eat  mince-pie  and  welsh-rabbit  at  midnight,  you  will  dream 
about  something  terrible ;  but  will  it  be  snakes,  or  will  it  be  a 
railroad  wreck,  or  will  it  be  white  horses  trampling  over  you? 
Obviously,  it  may  be  a  million  different  unpleasant  things ;  and 
what  is  it  that  picks  out  this  or  that  from  the  infinite  store 
of  your  memory,  and  brings  it  into  the  region  of  half- 
consciousness  which  we  call  the  dream? 

Professor  Freud's  discovery  is  in  brief  that  the  dream  is  a 
wish-fulfillment.  Our  instincts  present  to  our  consciousness  a 
great  mass  of  impulses  and  desires,  and  among  these  the  con- 
sciousness selects  what  it  pleases,  and  represses  and  refuses  to 
recognize  or  to  act  upon  the  others.  But  maybe  these  decisions 
are  not  altogether  satisfactory  to  the  subconsciousness.  The 
mind  of  the  body  is  in  rebellion  against  the  mind — shall  we  say 
of  reason,  or  shall  we  say  of  society?  The  mind  of  society, 
otherwise  known  as  the  moral  law,  says  that  you  shall  be  a 
good  little  boy,  and  shall  go  to  school  and  learn  what  you  are 
told,  and  on  Sunday  go  to  church  and  sit  very  still  through  a 
long  sermon;  whereas,  the  body  of  a  boy  would  rather  be  a 
savage,  hunting  birds'  nests  and  scalping  enemies  and  explor- 
ing magic  caves  full  of  precious  jewels.  So  the  subconscious- 
ness of  the  boy,  balked  and  miserable,  awaits  its  time,  and  finds 
its  satisfaction  when  the  boy  is  asleep  and  his  moral  censor  has 
relaxed  its  control. 

This  dream  mind  is  not  a  logical  and  orderly  thing  like  the 
conscious  mind ;  it  is  not  business-like  and  civilized,  it  does  not 
deal  in  abstractions.  It  is  far  more  interested  in  things  than 
in  words ;  it  does  not  present  us  with  formulas,  but  with  pic- 
tures, and  with  stories  of  weird  and  wonderful  happenings.  It 
is  like  the  mind  of  the  race,  which  we  study  in  legends  and 
religions.  It  does  not  tell  us  that  the  sun  is  a  mass  of  incan- 
descent hydrogen  gas,  so  and  so  many  miles  in  diameter;  it 
tells  us  that  the  sun  is  a  cosmic  hero  who  slays  the  black 
dragon  of  night.  So  the  mind  of  our  body  presents  us  with 
innumerable  pictures  and  symbols,  exactly  such  as  we  find  in 
poetry.     There  may  be,  and  frequently  is,  dispute  as  to  just 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  73 

what  a  poet  meant  by  this  or  that  particular  image,  but  if  we 
read  all  the  work  of  any  particular  poet,  we  get  a  certain 
impression  of  that  poet's  individuality.  If  he  is  always  talk- 
ing about  the  perfume  of  women's  hair  and  the  gleam  of  the 
white  flesh  of  nymphs  in  the  thickets^  we  are  not  left  in  doubt 
as  to  what  is  wrong  with  this  poet. 

And  just  so,  when  the  expert  sets  to  work  to  examine  all 
the  dreams  that  any  one  person  can  remember,  day  after  day, 
sooner  or  later  the  expert  observes  that  these  dreams  hover 
continually  about  one  particular  subject;  and  by  questioning 
the  person,  he  can  find  out  what  is  the  secret  which  is  troubling 
the  person,  perhaps  without  the  person  himself  being  aware  of 
it.  Of  course  there  are  many  people  who  like  nothing  so  much 
as  to  talk  about  themselves ;  and  many  are  spending  their 
time  and  their  money  on  the  latest  fad  of  being  "psyched," 
who  would,  in  any  properly  organized  world,  be  put  to  work 
at  hoeing  weeds  or  washing  their  own  clothes.  Nevertheless, 
it  is  a  fact  that  there  are  real  mental  disorders  in  the  world, 
and  innumerable  honest  and  earnest  people  who  have  some- 
thing the  matter  with  them  which  they  do  not  understand. 
Here  is  one  way  by  which  the  conscientious  investigator  can 
find  out  what  the  trouble  is,  and  make  it  clear  to  them,  and  by 
establishing  harmony  between  their  conscious  and  their  sub- 
conscious minds,  can  many  times  put  them  in  the  way  of  health 
and  happiness. 

Through  psychoanalysis  we  are  enabled  to  understand 
the  "split"  personality  and  its  cause.  We  discover  that  almost 
everyone  has  more  or  less  rudimentary  forms  of  multiple  per- 
sonality hidden  within  him;  made  out  of  desires  and  traits 
which  he  does  not  like,  or  which  the  world  forces  him  to  drive 
into  the  deeps  of  his  being.  These  may  be  evil  impulses,  of 
sex  or  violence;  they  may  be  the  most  noble  altruisms,  or 
artistic  yearnings,  ridiculous  things  in  a  world  of  "hustle."  A 
quite  normal  man  or  woman  may  keep  a  separate  self,  apart 
from  the  world,  living  a  Jekyll  life  of  business  propriety  and 
a  Hyde  life  of  religious  or  musical  ecstasy.  Or  again,  the 
repressed  impulses  may  integrate  themselves  in  the  un- 
conscious, and  you  may  have  genius  or  lunacy  or  both — 
"great  wits  to  madness  near  allied."  The  modern  knowledge 
on  such  dark  mysteries  you  may  find  in  Hart's  "The  Psychol- 
ogy of  Insanity." 


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE   PROBLEM    OF   IMMORTALITY 

(Discusses  the  survival  of  personality  from  the  moral  point  of 
view:  that  is,  have  we  any  claim  upon  life,  entitling  us  to  live 
forever?) 

As  we  explore  the  deeps  of  the  subconsciousness,  our  own 
and  other  people's,  we  find  ourselves  confronting  the  strange 
question:  Is  it  all  our  own  mind,  and  that  of  other  living 
people,  or  are  we  by  any  chance  dealing  with  the  minds  of 
those  who  are  dead?  A  great  many  earnest  people,  and  some 
very  learned  people,  are  fully  convinced  that  the  latter  is  the 
case,  and  we  have  now  to  consider  their  arguments. 

When  I  was  a  little  boy  I  used  to  read  and  hear  ghost 
stories,  and  would  shudder  over  them;  but  I  was  given  to 
understand  that  all  this  was  just  imagination,  I  must  not  take 
ghosts  seriously,  any  more  than  fairies  or  dragons  or  nymphs 
or  satyrs.  For  an  educated  person  to  take  ghosts  seriously 
— well,  such  a  person  would  be  almost  as  comical  as  that 
supremely  comical  person,  the  flying-machine  man.  Would  you 
believe  it,  in  those  days  there  actually  were  people  who  believed 
they  could  learn  to  fly  in  the  air,  and  spent  their  time  manu- 
facturing machines  for  this  purpose !  There  was  a  scientist  in 
Washington  who  had  this  "bug,"  and  built  himself  a  machine 
and  started  to  fly,  and  fell  into  the  Potomac  river.  We  all 
laughed  at  him — we  laughed  so  long  and  so  loud  that  we  killed 
the  poor  man ;  and  then,  a  few  years  later,  somebody  took  that 
machine  of  Professor  Langley's  and  actually  did  fly  with  it! 
But  that  was  after  I  had  grown  up  a  bit  more,  and  was  not 
quite  so  ready  to  laugh  at  an  idea  because  it  was  new. 

I  remember  vividly  my  first  meeting  with  a  man  who 
believed  in  ghosts.  He  was  a  Unitarian  clergyman,  the 
Reverend  Minot  J,  Savage  of  New  York.  I  was  sixteen  years 
old,  and  just  breaking  out  of  my  theological  shell,  and 
Doctor  Savage  helped  to  pry  me  loose.  He  was  a  grave  and 
kindly  man,  of  great  learning  and  intelligence,  and  I  remember 
vividly  my  consternation  when  one  day  he  told  me — oh,  yes,  he 
had  seen  many  ghosts,  he  was  accustomed  to  talk  with  ghosts 

74 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  75 

every  now  and  then.  There  was  no  doubt  whatever  that 
ghosts  existed! 

He  told  me  many  stories.  I  remember  one  so  well  that  I  do 
not  have  to  go  back  to  his  books  to  look  up  the  details.  It  was 
in  the  days  before  the  Atlantic  cable,  and  he  had  a  friend  who 
took  a  steamer  to  England.  One  night  Doctor  Savage  was 
awakened  and  found  the  ghost  of  his  friend  standing  by  his 
bedside.  The  ship  had  gone  down  off  the  Irish  coast,  so  the 
ghost  declared,  but  the  friend  did  not  want  Doctor  Savage  to 
think  that  he  had  suffered  from  the  pangs  of  drowning;  he 
had  been  struck  on  the  left  side  of  the  head  by  a  beam  of  the 
ship  and  had  been  killed  instantly.  Doctor  Savage  wrote  down 
these  circumstances  and  had  them  witnessed  by  a  number  of 
people,  and  two  or  three  weeks  later  he  received  word  that  the 
body  of  his  friend  had  been  found  on  the  Irish  coast,  with  the 
left  side  of  the  head  crushed  in. 

So  then,  of  course,  I  studied  the  subject  of  ghosts.  I  have 
studied  it  oflf  and  on  ever  since,  and  have  read  most  of  the 
important  new  discoveries  and  arguments  of  the  psychic 
researchers.  To  begin  with,  I  will  mention  the  contents  of  two 
large  volumes,  Gurney's  "Phantasms  of  the  Living."  In  this 
book  are  narrated  many  hundreds  of  cases,  of  which 
Doctor  Savage's  story  is  a  type.  It  appears  that  persons  at  the 
moment  of  death,  or  in  times  of  great  mental  stress,  do  some- 
how have  the  power  to  communicate  with  other  people,  even 
at  the  other  side  of  the  world.  A  few  such  cases  might  be 
attributed  to  coincidence  or  to  fraud,  but  when  you  have  so 
many  cases,  attested  in  minute  detail  by  so  many  hundreds  of 
otherwise  honest  people,  you  are  not  being  scientific  but  simply 
stupid  if  you  dismiss  the  whole  subject  with  contempt. 

Gurney  discusses  the  phenomenon  and  its  probable  causes. 
We  know,  of  course,  that  hallucinations  are  among  the  most 
common  of  psychic  phenomenon.  Your  subconscious  mind  can 
be  caused  to  see  and  hear  and  feel  anything;  likewise  it  has 
power  to  cause  you  to  see  and  hear  and  feel  anything.  In 
practically  all  cases  of  multiple  personality  some  of  the  split- 
off  personalities  can  cause  the  others  to  see  and  hear  and  feel. 
And  the  consciousness,  you  must  understand,  takes  these  things 
to  be  just  as  real  as  real  things;  there  is  no  way  you  can 
tell  an  hallucination  from  reality — except  to  ask  other  people 
about  it.  And  if  we  admit  the  idea  of  telepathy,  we  may 
say  that  phantasms  are  hallucinations  caused  by  this  means; 


76  Mind  and  Body 

that  is,  the  subconscious  mind  of  your  wife  or  your  mother  or 
your  friend  who  is  ill  or  dying,  transmits  to  your  subconscious 
mind  some  vivid  impression,  which  causes  your  own  subcon- 
scious mind  to  present  to  your  consciousness  a  perfect  image 
of  that  person,  walking  and  talking  with  you,  and  your  con- 
sciousness has  no  way  of  telling  but  that  the  image  is  real. 

So  much  for  phantasms  of  the  living.  But  are  there  any 
phantasms  of  the  dead?  Are  there  any  cases  in  which  the 
time  of  the  appearance  can  be  proven  to  be  subsequent  to  the 
time  of  death  ?  Even  this  would  not  prove  survival,  of  course ; 
it  is  perfectly  possible  that  the  telepathic  impulse  might  be 
delayed  in  our  own  minds,  it  might  not  flash  into  consciousness 
until  our  own  state  of  mind  made  it  possible.  Can  we  say  that 
there  are  cases  in  which  the  facts  communicated  are  such  as 
to  convince  us  that  the  person  was  already  dead,  and  was 
telling  us  something  as  a  dead  person  and  not  as  a  living  one  ? 

Before  we  go  into  this  question,  let  us  clear  the  ground  for 
the  subject  by  discussing  the  survival  of  personality  from  a 
more  general  standpoint.  What  is  it  that  we  want  to  prove? 
What  are  the  probabilities  of  its  being  true?  What  would  be 
the  consequences  of  its  not  being  true  ?  Have  we  any  grounds, 
other  than  those  of  psychic  research,  for  thinking  that  it  is 
true,  or  that  it  may  be  true,  or  that  it  ought  to  be  true  ?  What, 
so  to  speak,  are  the  morals  of  the  doctrine  of  immortality? 

Well,  to  begin  with,  the  survival  of  the  soul  after  death 
and  forever  is  one  of  the  principal  doctrines  of  the  Christian 
religion.  Many  devout  Christians  will  read  this  book,  and  I 
will  seem  to  them  blasphemous  when  I  say  that  this  argument 
does  not  concern  me.  I  count  myself  one  of  the  lovers  and 
friends  of  Jesus,  I  am  presumptuous  enough  to  believe  that  if 
he  were  on  earth,  I  would  understand  him  and  get  along  with 
him  excellently;  but  I  do  not  know  any  reason  why  I  should 
believe  this,  that,  or  the  other  doctrine  about  life  because  any 
religious  sect,  founded  upon  the  name  of  Jesus,  commands  me 
so  to  believe.  I  see  no  more  reason  for  adopting  the  idea  of 
heaven  because  it  is  a  Christian  idea  than  I  see  for  adopting 
the  idea  of  reincarnation  because  it  is  a  precious  and  holy  idea 
to  hundreds  of  millions  of  Buddhists.  I  have  some  very  good 
friends  who  are  Theosophists,  and  are  quite  convinced  of  this 
idea  of  reincarnation;  that  is,  that  the  soul  comes  back  into 
life  over  and  over  again  in  many  diflrerent  bodies,  thus  com- 
pleting itself  and  renewing  itself  and  expiating  its  sins.     My 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  77 

Theosophist  friends  have  a  most  elaborate  and  complicated 
body  of  what  they  consider  to  be  knowledge  on  this  subject; 
yet  I  have  to  take  the  liberty  of  saying  that  I  cannot  see  that 
it  has  any  relation  to  reality.  It  seems  to  me  as  completely 
unproven  as  any  other  fairy  story,  or  myth,  or  legend — for 
example,  the  seven  infernos  of  Dante,  and  the  elaborate  and 
complicated  torments  that  are  suffered  there. 

But,  it  will  be  argued,  Jesus  rose  from  the  dead,  and  thus 
proved  the  immortality  of  the  soul.  Now,  in  the  first  place, 
there  are  many  learned  investigators  who  consider  there  is 
insufficient  evidence  for  believing  that  Jesus  ever  lived;  and 
certainly  if  this  be  so,  it  will  be  difficult  to  prove  that  he  rose 
from  the  dead.  Again,  it  was  a  common  occurrence  for  cru- 
cified men  not  to  die ;  sometimes  it  happened  that  their  guards 
allowed  them  to  be  spirited  away — even  nowadays  we  have 
known  of  prison  guards  being  bribed  to  allow  a  prisoner  to 
escape.  Again,  the  events  of  the  return  of  Jesus  may  have 
been  just  such  psychic  phenomena  as  we  are  trying  in  this 
chapter  to  explain.  Or,  once  more,  they  may  have  been  purely 
legends.  A  very  brief  study  will  convince  a  thinking  person 
that  the  people  of  that  time  were  ready  to  believe  anything, 
and  to  accept  facts  upon  such  authority,  and  to  make  them  the 
basis  for  a  scientific  conclusion,  is  simply  to  be  childish. 

I  shall  be  told,  of  course,  that  it  is  in  the  Bible,  and  there- 
fore it  must  be  true.  The  Bible  is  inspired,  you  say ;  and  per- 
haps this  is  so.  But  then,  a  great  deal  of  other  literature  is 
inspired,  and  that  does  not  relieve  me  of  the  task  of  compar- 
ing these  various  inspirations,  and  judging  them,  and  picking 
out  what  is  of  use  to  me.  The  Bible  is  the  literature  of  the 
ancient  Hebrews  for  a  couple  of  thousand  years.  It  repre- 
sents what  the  race  mind  of  a  great  people  for  one  generation 
after  another  judged  worth  recording  and  preserving.  You 
may  get  an  idea  what  this  means,  if  you  will  picture  to  your- 
self a  large  volume  of  English  literature,  containing  some 
Teutonic  myths,  and  the  Saxon  chronicles,  and  the  "Morte 
d'Arthur,"  and  several  of  Chaucer's  stories,  and  some  Irish 
fairy  tales,  and  some  of  Bacon's  essays,  and  Shakespeare's 
"Venus  and  Adonis,*'  and  the  English  prayer-book,  and  the 
architect's  specifications  for  Westminster  Abbey,  and  a  good 
part  of  "Burke's  Peerage" ;  also  Blackstone's  "Commentaries," 
a  number  of  Wesley's  hymns,  and  Pope's  "Essay  on  Man,"  and 
some  chapters  of  Carlyle's  "Past  and  Present,"  and  Glad- 


78  jNIiND  AND  Body 

stone's  speeches,  and  Blake's  poems,  and  Captain  Cook's  story 
of  his  voyage  around  the  world,  and  Southey's  "Life  of  Nel- 
son," and  Morris's  "News  from  Nowhere,"  and  Blatchford's 
"Merrie  England,"  and  scores  of  pages  from  Hansard,  which 
is  the  equivalent  of  our  Congressional  Record.  You  may  find 
this  description  irreverent,  but  do  not  think  it  is  meant  so.  Do 
me  the  honor  to  get  out  your  Bible  and  look  it  over  from  this 
point  of  view ! 

But,  you  say,  if  we  die  altogether  when  we  finish  -  this 
earthly  life,  what  becomes  of  moral  responsibility  and  the  pun- 
ishment of  sins?  What  shall  we  say  to  the  wicked  man  to 
make  him  be  good,  if  we  cannot  reward  him  with  a  heaven 
and  frighten  him  with  a  hell?  Well,  my  first  answer  is  that 
we  have  been  trying  this  process  for  a  couple  of  thousand 
years,  and  the  results  seem  to  indicate  that  we  might  better 
seek  out  some  other  method  of  inducing  men  to  behave  them- 
selves. They  do  not  believe  so  completely  in  heaven  and  hell 
these  days,  but  there  were  times  in  history  when  they  did 
believe  completely,  and  not  merely  were  the  believers  just  as 
cruel,  they  were  just  as  treacherous  and  just  as  gluttonous  and 
just  as  drunken.  If  you  want  to  satisfy  yourself  on  this  point, 
I  refer  you  to  my  book  "The  Profits  of  Religion,"  page  129. 

Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  I  think  I  can  discern  the  outlines 
of  a  system  of  rewards  and  punishments  automatically  work- 
ing in  the  life  of  men.  I  am  not  sure  that  I  can  prove  that  the 
wicked  always  get  punished  and  the  virtuous  always  rewarded ; 
yet,  when  I  stop  and  think,  I  am  sure  that  I  would  not  care  to 
change  places  with  any  of  the  wicked  people  that  I  know  m 
this  world.  Life  may  not  always  be  "getting"  them,  but  it  has 
a  way  of  "getting"  their  descendants,  and  I  could  not  be 
entirely  happy  if  I  knew  that  my  son  and  his  sons  were  going 
to  share  the  fate  which  I  now  observe  befalling,  for  example, 
the  grand  dukes  of  Russia  and  their  children.  Life  is  one 
thing,  and  it  does  not  exist  for  the  individual,  but  for  the  race  ; 
its  causes  and  effects  do  not  always  manifest  themselves  in  one 
individual,  but  in  a  line  of  descendants.  "Why  are  they  called 
dynasties  ?"  asked  one  of  my  professors  of  history ;  and  a  stu- 
dent brought  the  session  to  an  end  by  answering:  "Because 
that  is  what  they  always  seem  to  do !" 

But  this  is  not  perfect  justice,  you  will  argue.  It  is  not 
perfect,  from  the  point  of  view  of  you  or  me ;  but  then,  I  ask, 
what  else  is  there  in  the  world  that  is  perfect  from  that  point 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  79 

of  view?  Why  should  our  justice  be  any  more  perfect  than, 
for  example,  our  health  or  our  thinking  or  our  climate  or  our 
government?  And,  may  it  not  very  well  be  that  our  justice  is 
up  to  us,  in  precisely  the  same  way  that  some  of  these  other 
things  are  up  to  us  ?  Maybe  what  we  have  to  do  is  to  set  to 
work  to  see  to  it  that  virtue  does  always  get  rewarded  and 
vice  does  always  get  punished,  right  here  and  now,  instead  of 
waiting  for  an  omnipotent  God  to  attend  to  it  in  some  hypo- 
thetical heaven. 

I  find  this  life  of  mine  very  wonderful,  and  enormously 
interesting,  I  am  willing  to  take  it  on  the  terms  that  it  is 
given,  and  to  try  to  make  the  best  of  it ;  and  I  do  not  see  that 
I  have  any  right  to  dictate  what  shall  be  given  me  in  some 
future  life.  If  my  father  gives  me  a  Christmas  present,  I  am 
happy  and  grateful ;  and,  of  course,  if  I  know  that  he  is  going 
to  give  rae  another  present  next  Christmas,  I  am  still  more 
happy;  but  I  do  not  see  that  I  have  any  right  to  argue  that 
because  he  gives  me  one  Christmas  present,  he  must  give  me 
an  unlimited  number  of  them,  and  I  think  it  would  be  very 
ungrateful  of  me  to  refuse  to  thank  him  for  a  Christmas 
present  until  I  had  made  sure  that  I  was  to  get  one  next  time ! 

Neither  do  I  find  myself  such  a  wonderful  person  that  I 
can  assert  that  the  morality  of  the  universe  absolutely  depends 
upon  the  fact  that  I  am  immortal.  Of  course,  I  should  like  to 
live  forever,  and  to  know  all  the  wonderful  things  that  are 
going  to  happen  in  the  world,  and  if  it  is  true  that  I  am  so  to 
live,  I  shall  be  immensely  delighted.  But  I  cannot  say  that  it 
must  be  true,  and  all  I  can  do  is  to  investigate  the  prob- 
abilities. On  this  point  my  view  is  stated  in  a  sentence  of 
Spinoza's :  "He  who  would  love  God  rightly  must  not  desire 
that  God  love  him  in  return." 

To  sum  up,  the  question  of  immortality  is  purely  a  ques- 
tion of  fact.  It  is  one  to  be  approached  in  a  spirit  of  open- 
minded  inquiry,  entirely  unaffected  by  hopes  or  fears  or  dog- 
mas or  moral  claims.  It  is  worth  while  to  get  clear  that  we 
may  be  immortal,  even  though  we  do  not  now  know  it  and 
cannot  now  prove  it;  it  is  possible  that  all  psychic  research 
might  end  in  telepathy,  and  still,  when  we  die,  we  might  wake 
up  and  find  ourselves  alive.  It  might  possibly  be  that  some  of 
us  are  immortal  and  not  all  of  us.  It  might  be  that  some  parts 
of  us  are  immortal  and  not  the  rest.  It  might  be  that  our  sub- 
consciousness is  immortal  and  not  our  consciousness.    It  might 


80  Mind  and  Body 

be  that  all  of  us,  or  some  part  of  us,  survive  for  a  time,  but 
not  forever.  This  last  is  something  which  I  myself  am 
inclined  to  think  may  be  the  case. 

Also,  it  seems  worth  while  to  mention  that  it  is  no  argu- 
ment against  immortality  that  we  cannot  imagine  it,  that  we 
cannot  picture  a  universe  consisting  of  uncountable  billions  of 
living  souls,  or  what  these  souls  would  do  to  pass  the  time.  It 
may  very  well  be  that  among  these  souls  there  is  no  such  thing 
as  time.  It  may  be  that  they  are  thoroughly  occupied  in  ways 
beyond  our  imagining,  or  again,  that  they  are  not  occupied,  and 
under  no  necessity  of  being  occupied.  Let  the  person  who 
presents  such  arguments  begin  by  picturing  to  you  how  the 
brain  cells  manage  to  store  up  the  uncounted  millions  of 
memories  which  you  have,  the  thousands  of  words  and  com- 
binations of  words,  and  the  thoughts  which  go  with  them, 
musical  notes  and  tunes,  colors  and  odors  and  visual  impres- 
sions, memories  of  the  past  and  hopes  of  the  future  and 
dreams  that  never  were.  Where  are  all  those  hundreds  of 
millions  of  things,  and  what  are  they  like  when  they  are  not 
in  our  consciousness,  and  how  do  they  pass  the  time,  and 
where  were  they  in  the  hundreds  of  millions  of  years  before 
we  were  born,  and  where  will  they  be  in  the  hundreds  of  mil- 
lions of  years  of  the  future  ?  When  our  wise  men  can  answer 
these  questions  completely,  it  will  be  time  enough  for  them  to 
tell  us  about  the  impossibility  of  immortality. 


CHAPTER  XV 

THE  EVIDENCE   FOR  SURVIVAL 

(Discusses  the  data  of  psychic  research,  and  the  proofs  of 
spiritism  thus  put  before  us.) 

Let  us  now  take  up  the  question  of  survival  of  personality 
after  death  from  the  strictly  scientific  point  of  view;  let  us 
consider  what  facts  we  have,  and  the  indications  they  seem  to 
jive.  First,  we  know  that  to  all  appearances  the  conscious- 
ness and  the  subconsciousness  are  bound  up  with  the  body. 
They  grow  with  the  body,  they  decline  with  the  body,  they 
seem  to  die  with  the  body.  We  can  irretrievably  damage  the 
consciousness  by  drawing  a  whiff  of  cyanogen  gas  into  the 
lungs,  or  by  sticking  a  pin  into  the  brain,  or  by  clogging  one 
of  its  tiny  blood  vessels  with  waste  matter.  It  is  terrible  to  us 
to  think  that  the  mind  of  a  great  poet  or  prophet  or  statesman 
may  be  snuffed  out  of  existence  in  such  a  way ;  but  then,  it  is 
no  argument  against  a  fact  to  say  that  it  is  terrible.  Insanity 
is  terrible,  war  is  terrible,  pestilence  is  terrible,  so  also  are 
tigers  and  poisonous  snakes ;  but  all  these  things  exist,  and  all 
these  things  have  power  over  the  wisest  and  greatest  mind,  to 
put  an  end  to  its  work  on  this  earth  at  least. 

And  now  we  come  with  the  new  instrument  of  psychic 
research,  to  probe  the  question:  What  becomes  of  this  con- 
sciousness when  it  disappears  ?  Can  we  prove  that  it  is  still  in 
existence,  and  is  able  by  any  method  to  communicate  with  us? 
Those  who  answer  "Yes"  argue  that  the  mind  of  the  dead 
person,  unable  to  use  its  own  bodily  machinery  any  longer, 
manages  in  the  hypnotic  trance  to  use  the  bodily  machinery  of 
another  person,  called  a  "medium,"  and  by  it  to  make  some 
kind  of  record  to  identify  itself. 

This,  of  course,  is  a  strange  idea,  and  requires  a  good  deal 
of  proof.  The  law  of  probability  requires  us  not  to  accept  an 
unlikely  explanation,  if  there  is  any  more  simple  one  which  can 
account  for  the  facts.  When  we  examine  the  product  of  auto- 
matic writing,  table-tipping,  and  other  psychic  phenomena,  we 
have  first  to  ask  ourselves.  Is  there  anything  in  all  this  which 
cannot  be  explained  by  what  we  already  know  ?    Then,  second, 

81 


82  Mind  and  Body 

we  have  to  ask,  Is  there  any  other  supposition  which  will 
explain  the  facts,  and  which  is  easier  to  believe  than  the  spirit 
theory  ? 

These  "spirits"  apparently  desire  to  convince  us  of  their 
reality,  and  they  tell  us  many  things  which  are  expected  to 
convince  us ;  they  tell  us  things  which  we  ourselves  do  not 
know,  and  which  spirits  might  know.  But  here  again  we  run 
up  against  the  problem  of  the  subconsciousness,  with  its  in- 
finite mass  of  "forgotten"  knowledge.  It  is  not  so  easy  for 
the  "spirits"  to  tell  us  things  which  we  can  be  sure  our  sub- 
conscious mind  could  not  possibly  contain.  Also,  there  comes 
the  additional  element  of  telepathy.  It  appears  to  be  a  fact 
that  under  trance  conditions,  or  under  any  especially  exciting 
conditions  of  the  consciousness,  one  mind  can  reach  out  and 
take  something  out  of  another  mind,  or  one  mind  can  cause 
something  to  be  passed  over  to  another  mind ;  and  so  informa- 
tion can  be  communicated  to  the  mind  of  a  medium,  and  can 
appear  in  automatic  writing,  or  in  clairvoyance,  or  in  cr3'^stal 
gazing. 

One  of  the  most  conscientious  and  earnest  of  all  the  in- 
vestigators of  this  subject  was  the  late  Professor  Hyslop, 
who  many  years  ago  sought  to  teach  me  "practical  morality" 
'  (from  the  bourgeois  point  of  view)  in  Columbia  University. 
Professor  Hyslop  worked  for  fifteen  years  with  a  medium 
by  the  name  of  Mrs.  Piper,  who  was  apparently  sincere  and 
was  never  exposed  in  any  kind  of  fraud.  In  Professor 
Hyslop's  books  you  will  find  innumerable  instances  of  amaz- 
ing facts  brought  out  in  Mrs.  Piper's  trances.  You  will  find 
Professor  Hyslop  arguing  that  the  only  way  telepathy  can 
account  for  these  facts  is  by  the  supposition  that  there  is  a 
universal  subconscious  mind,  or  that  the  subconscious  mind 
of  the  medium  possesses  the  power  to  reach  into  the  sub- 
conscious mind  of  every  other  living  person  and  take  out 
anything  from  it.  But  for  my  part,  I  cannot  see  that  the 
case  is  quite  so  difficult.  Professor  Hyslop  recites,  for  example, 
how  Mrs.  Piper  would  tell  him  facts  about  some  long  dead 
relative — facts  which  he  did  not  know,  but  was  later  able 
to  verify.  But  that  proves  simply  nothing  at  all,  because 
there  could  be  no  possible  way  for  Professor  Hyslop  to  be 
sure  that  he  had  never  known  these  facts  about  his  relatives. 
The  facts  might  have  been  in  his  subconscious  mind  without 
having  ever  been  in  his  conscious  mind  at  all ;  he  might  have 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  83 

heard  people  talking  about  these  matters  while  he  was  reading 
a  book,  or  playing  as  a  boy,  paying  no  attention  to  what  was 
said. 

And  then  came  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  with  his  investigations. 
I  will  say  this  for  his  work — he  was  the  first  person  who  was 
able  to  make  real  to  my  mind  the  startling  idea  that  perhaps 
after  all  the  dead  might  be  alive  and  able  to  communicate 
with  us.  You  will  find  what  he  has  to  say  in  his  book,  "The 
Survival  of  Man,"  and  it  seems  fair  that  a  great  scientist  and 
a  great  man  should  have  a  chance  to  convince  you  of  what 
seem  to  him  the  most  important  facts  in  the  world. 

Sir  Oliver's  son  Raymond  was  killed  in  the  war,  and  it 
is  claimed  that  he  began  at  once  to  communicate  with  his 
family.  Among  other  things,  he  told  them  of  the  existence 
of  a  picture,  which  none  of  them  had  ever  seen  or  heard  of, 
a  group  photograph  which  he  described  in  detail.  But,  of 
course,  other  people  in  this  group  knew  of  the  existence  of 
the  photograph,  and  so  we  have  again  the  possibility  that  some 
member  of  Sir  Oliver's  family  may  have  taken  into  his  sub- 
conscious mind  without  knowing  it  an  impression  or  descrip- 
tion of  that  picture.  If  you  care  to  experiment,  you  will  find 
that  you  can  frequently  play  a  part  in  the  dreams  of  a  child 
by  talking  to  it  in  its  sleep ;  and  that  is  only  one  of  a  thousand 
different  ways  by  which  some  member  of  a  family  might 
acquire,  without  knowing  it,  information  of  the  existence  of 
a  photograph. 

There  is  another  possibility  to  be  considered — ^that  a  por- 
tion of  the  consciousness  may  survive,  and  not  necessarily 
forever.  We  are  accustomed  when  death  takes  place  to  see 
the  body  before  us,  and  we  know  that  we  can  preserve  the 
body  for  thousands  of  years  if  we  wish.  Why  is  it  not  possible 
that  when  conscious  life  is  brought  to  a  sudden  end,  there  may 
remain  some  portion  of  the  consciousness,  or  of  the  sub- 
consciousness, cut  off  from  the  body,  and  slowly  fading  back 
into  the  universal  mind  energy,  whatever  we  please  to  call  it? 
There  is  a  hard  part  of  the  body,  the  skeleton,  which  survives 
for  some  time;  why  might  there  not  be  a  central  core  of  the 
mind  which  is  similarly  tough  and  enduring?  Of  course,  if 
consciousness  is  a  function  of  the  brain,  it  must  decay  as  the 
brain  decays;  but  how  would  it  be  if  the  brain  were  a  func- 
tion of  the  consciousness — which  is,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  quite 
as  likely  a  guess. 


84  Mind  and  Body 

I  find  many  facts  which  seem  to  indicate  the  plausibility 
of  this  idea.  I  notice  that  in  trance  phenomena  it  is  the  spirits 
of  those  recently  dead  which  seem  to  manifest  the  most  vitality. 
Of  course,  you  can  go  to  any  seance  in  the  "white  light"  dis- 
trict of  your  city  and  receive  communications  from  the  souls 
of  Caesar  and  Napoleon  and  Alexander  the  Great  and  Poca- 
hontas, and  if  the  medium  does  not  happen  to  be  literary, 
you  can  communicate  with  Hamlet  and  Don  Quixote  and 
Siegfried  and  Achilles;  but  you  will  not  find  much  reality 
about  any  of  these  people,  they  will  not  tell  you  very  much 
about  the  everyday  details  of  their  lives.  This  fact  that  so 
much  of  what  the  "spirits"  tell  us  is  of  our  own  time  tends 
to  cast  doubt  on  the  idea  that  the  dead  survive  forever.  How 
simple  it  would  be  to  convince  us,  if  the  spirit  of  Sophocles 
would  come  back  to  earth  and  tell  us  where  to  dig  in  order  to 
find  copies  of  his  lost  tragedies!  You  would  think  that  the 
soul  of  Sophocles,  seeing  our  great  need  of  beauty  and  wis- 
dom, would  be  interested  to  give  us  his  works !  From  genius, 
operating  under  the  guidance  of  the  conscious  mind,  we  get 
sublimity,  majesty  and  power;  but  what  the  trance  mediums 
give  us  suggests,  both  in  its  moral  and  intellectual  quality,  the 
operation  of  the  subconscious.  It  is  exactly  like  what  we  get, 
for  example,  from  dissociated  personalities. 

There  are,  to  be  sure,  the  books  of  Patience  Worth,  pro- 
duced by  the  automatic  writing  of  a  lady  in  St.  Louis,  who 
tells  us  in  evident  good  faith  that  her  conscious  personality  is 
entirely  innocent  of  Patience,  and  all  her  thought  and  doings. 
Patience  writes  long  novels  and  dramas  in  a  quaint  kind  of 
old  English,  and  the  lady  in  St.  Louis  knows  nothing  about 
this  language.  But  does  she  positively  know  that  when  she 
was  a  child,  she  never  happened  to  be  in  the  room  with 
someone  who  was  reading  old  English  aloud  ?  Nothing  seems 
more  likely  than  that  her  subconscious  mind  heard  some  quaint, 
strange  language,  and  took  possession  of  it,  and  built  up  a 
personality  around  it,  and  even  made  a  new  language  and  a 
new  literature  from  that  starting  point. 

That  is  precisely  the  kind  of  thing  in  which  the  subcon- 
scious revels.  It  creates  new  characters,  with  an  imagination 
infinite  and  inexhaustible.  Who  has  not  waked  up  and  been 
astounded  at  the  variety  and  reality  of  a  dream?  Who  has 
not  told  his  dreams  and  laughed  over  them  ?  The  subconscious 
will  play  at  games,  it  will  act  and  rehearse  elaborate  roles; 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  85 

it  will  put  on  costumes,  and  delight  in  being  Caesar  and 
Napoleon  and  Alexander  the  Great  and  Pocahontas  and  Ham- 
let and  Don  Quixote  and  Siegfried  and  Achilles.  Yes,  it  will 
even  play  at  being  "spirits"!  It  will  be  mischievous  and 
impish;  it  will  be  swallowed  up  with  a  sense  of  its  own  im- 
portance, taking  an  insolent  delight  in  convincing  the  world's 
most  learned  scientists  of  the  fact  that  its  play-acting  is  reality. 
It  will  call  itself  "Raymond"  to  move  and  thrill  a  grief- 
stricken  family;  it  will  call  itself  "Phinuit"  and  "Dr.  Hodgson," 
and  cause  an  earnest  professor  of  "practical  morality"  to  give 
up  a  respectable  position  in  Columbia  University  and  write 
books  to  convince  the  world  that  the  dead  are  sending  him 
messages. 

Consider,  for  example,  the  multiple  personality  of  Miss 
Beauchamp.  Remember  that  here  we  are  not  dealing  with 
any  guess  work  about  "spirits";  here  we  have  half  a  dozen 
different  "controls,"  none  of  them  the  least  bit  dead,  but  all 
of  them  a  part  of  the  consciousness  of  one  entirely  alive  young 
lady.  A  specialist  has  spent  some  six  years  investigating  the 
case,  day  after  day,  week  after  week,  writing  down  the  minute 
details  of  what  happens.  And  now  consider  the  miscreant 
known  as  "Sally."  Sally  is  just  as  real  as  any  child  whom 
you  ever  held  in  your  arms.  Sally  has  love  and  hate,  fear 
and  hope,  pain  and  delight — and  Sally  is  a  little  demon,  created 
entirely  out  of  the  subconsciousness  of  a  highly  refined  and 
conscientious  yoimg  college  graduate  of  Boston.  Sally  spends 
Miss  Beauchamp's  money  on  candy,  and  eats  it;  Sally  pawns 
Miss  Beauchamp's  watch  and  deliberately  loses  the  ticket; 
Sally  uses  Miss  Beauchamp's  lips  and  tongue  to  tell  lies  about 
Miss  Beauchamp;  Sally  strikes  Miss  Beauchamp  dumb,  or 
makes  her  hear  exactly  the  opposite  of  what  is  spoken  to  her. 
Yes,  and  Sally  pleads  and  fights  frantically  for  her  life ;  Sally 
enters  into  intrigues  with  other  parts  of  Miss  Beauchamp, 
and  for  years  deliberately  fools  Doctor  Prince,  who  is  her 
Recording  Angel  and  Heavenly  Judge! 

And  can  anybody  doubt  that  Sally  could  have  fooled  a 
grieving  mother,  and  made  that  mother  think  she  was  talking 
to  the  ghost  of  a  long  lost  child?  Can  anybody  doubt  that 
Sally  could  and  would  play  the  part  of  any  person  she  had 
ever  known,  or  of  any  historic  character  she  had  ever  read 
ab^ut?  And  don't  overlook  the  all-important  fact  that  the 
c^iscious  Miss  Beauchamp  was  absolutely  innocent  of  all  this, 


86  Mind  and  Body 

and  was  horrified  when  she  was  told  about  it.  So  here  you 
have  the  following  situation,  no  matter  of  guesswork,  but 
definitely  established :  your  dearest  friend  may  act  as  a  medium, 
and  in  all  good  faith  may  bring  to  the  surface  some  part  of 
his  or  her  subconsciousness,  which  masquerades  before  you  in 
a  hundred  different  roles,  and  plays  upon  you  with  deliberate 
malice  the  most  subtle  and  elaborate  and  cruel  tricks. 

And  how  much  worse  the  situation  becomes  when  to  this 
there  is  added  the  possibility  of  conscious  fraud!  When  the 
mediimi  is  a  person  who  is  taking  your  money,  and  thrives 
by  making  you  believe  in  the  "spirits"  she  produces!  You 
may  go  to  Lily  Dale,  in  New  York  state,  the  home  of  the 
Spiritualists,  where  they  have  a  convention  every  summer, 
and  in  row  after  row  of  tents  you  may  hear,  and  even  see, 
every  kind  of  spirit  you  ever  dreamed  of,  ringing  bells  and 
shaking  tambourines  and  dancing  jigs.  And  you  may  see  poor 
farmers'  wives,  with  tears  streaming  down  their  cheeks,  listen- 
ing to  the  endearments  of  their  dead  children,  and  to  wisdom 
from  the  lips  of  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  speaking  with  a 
Bowery  accent.  This  kind  of  thing  was  exposed  many  years 
ago  by  Will  Irwin  in  a  book  called  "The  Medium  Game" ;  and 
then — after  traveling  from  one  kind  of  medium  to  another, 
and  studying  all  their  frauds,  Irwin  tells  how  he  went  into  a 
"parlor"  on  Sixth  Avenue,  and  there  by  a  fat  old  woman  who 
had  never  seen  him  before,  was  suddenly  told  the  most  inti- 
mate secrets  of  his  life! 

It  has  recently  been  announced  that  Thomas  A.  Edison  is 
at  work  upon  a  device  to  enable  spirits  to  communicate  with 
the  living,  if  there  really  are  spirits  seeking  to  do  this.  It  is 
Edison's  idea  that  spirits  may  inhabit  some  kind  of  infinitely 
rarefied  astral  body,  and  he  proposes  to  manufacture  an  in- 
strument which  is  sensitive  to  an  impression  many  millions 
of  times  fainter  than  anything  the  human  body  can  feel.  This 
should  make  it  easier  for  the  spirits,  and  should  constitute  a 
fairer  test,  possibly  a  decisive  one.  When  that  machine  is 
perfected  and  put  to  work  by  scientific  men,  I  wish  to  suggest 
a  few  tests  which  will  convince  me  that  there  really  are  spirits, 
and  that  the  results  are  not  to  be  explained  by  telepathy. 

First,  assuming  that  the  spirits  live  forever,  there  are 
some  useful  things  which  were  known  to  the  people  of  ancient 
time,  and  are  not  known  to  anyone  living  now.  For  example, 
let  one  of  the  Egyptian  craftsmen  come  forward  and  tell  us 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  87 

the  secret  of  their  glass-staining,  which  I  understand  is  now 
a  lost  art.  And  then  Sophocles,  as  I  have  already  suggested, 
will  tell  us  where  we  can  find  his  lost  dramas ;  or  if  he  doesn't 
know  where  any  copies  are  buried,  let  him  find  in  the  spirit 
world  some  scribe  or  librarian  or  book-lover  who  can  give 
us  this  priceless  information.  All  over  the  ancient  lands  are 
buried  and  forgotten  cities,  and  in  those  cities  are  papyrus 
scrolls  and  graven  tablets  and  bricks.  Infinite  stores  of  knowl- 
edge are  thus  concealed  from  us;  and  how  simple  for  the 
ancient  ones  who  possess  this  information  to  make  it  known 
to  us,  and  so  to  convince  us  of  their  reality! 

Or,  again,  supposing  that  spirits  are  not  immortal,  but 
that  they  slowly  fade  from  life  as  do  their  bodies.  Suppose 
that  a  Raymond  Lodge  or  other  recently  dead  soldier  wishes 
to  communicate  with  his  father  and  to  convince  his  father 
that  it  is  really  an  independent  being,  and  not  simply  a  part 
of  the  father's  subconscious  mind — let  him  try  something  like 
this.  Let  the  father  write  six  brief  notes,  and  put  them  in 
six  envelopes  all  alike,  and  shuffle  them  up  and  put  them  in 
a  hat  and  draw  out  one  of  them.  Now,  assuming  that  the 
experimenter  is  honest,  there  is  no  living  human  being  who 
knows  the  contents  of  that  envelope,  and  if  the  medium  is 
dipping  into  the  subconscious  mind  of  the  experimenter,  the 
chances  are  one  in  six  of  the  right  note  being  hit  upon.  Assum- 
ing that  spirits  may  not  be  able  to  get  inside  an  envelope  and 
read  a  folded  letter,  there  is  no  objection  to  the  experimenter, 
provided  he  is  honest,  and  provided  there  are  no  mirrors  or 
other  tricks,  holding  the  envelope  behind  his  back,  and  tearing 
it  open,  and  spreading  it  out  for  the  convenience  of  the  spirit. 
And  now,  if  the  spirit  can  read  that  letter  correctly  every 
time,  we  shall  be  fairly  certain  that  whatever  force  we  are 
dealing  with,  it  is  not  the  subconscious  mind  of  the  experi- 
menter. 

Or,  let  us  take  another  test.  Let  us  have  a  roulette  wheel 
in  a  covered  box,  or  hidden  away  so  that  no  one  but  the 
spirit  can  see  it.  We  spin  the  wheel,  and  any  one  of  the 
habitues  of  Monte  Carlo  can  figure  out  the  chance  of  the  little 
ball  dropping  into  any  particular  number.  If  now  the  spirit 
can  tell  us  each  time  where  we  shall  find  the  ball,  we  shall 
know  that  we  are  dealing  with  knowledge  which  does  not  exist 
either  in  the  conscious  or  the  subconscious  mind  of  any  living 
human  being. 


88  Mind  and  Body 

Among  the  things  that  "spirits"  have  been  accustomed  to 
do,  since  the  days  when  they  first  made  their  appearance  with 
the  Fox  sisters  in  America,  are  the  lifting  of  tables  and  the 
ringing  of  bells  and  the  assuming  of  visible  forms.  These 
are  what  is  known  as  "materializations,"  and  when  I  was  a 
boy,  and  used  to  hear  people  talking  about  these  things,  there 
was  always  one  test  required :  let  the  materializations  manifest 
themselves  upon  recording  instruments  scientifically  devised; 
let  photographs  be  taken  of  them,  let  them  be  weighed  and 
measured,  and  so  on.  Well,  time  has  moved  forward,  and 
these  tests  have  been  met,  and  it  appears  that  "materializa- 
tions" are  facts — although  it  is  still  as  uncertain  as  ever  what 
they  are  materializations  of.  An  English  scientist,  Professor 
Crawford,  has  published  a  book  entitled  "The  Reality  of 
Psychic  Phenomena,"  in  which  he  tells  the  results  of  many 
years  of  testing  materializations  by  the  strictest  scientific 
methods.  When  the  medium  "levitates"  a  table — that  is, 
causes  it  to  go  up  in  the  air  without  physical  contact — it 
appears  that  her  own  weight  increases  by  exactly  the  weight 
of  the  table.  When  she  exerts  any  force,  which  appa.rently 
she  can  do  at  a  distance,  the  recording  instruments  show  the 
exact  counter-force  in  her  own  body. 

The  results  of  these  investigations  are  calculated  at  first 
to  take  your  breath  away.  It  begins  to  appear  that  the 
theosophists  may  be  right,  and  that  we  may  have  one  or 
more  "astral"  bodies  within  or  coincident  with  the  physical 
body ;  and  that  under  the  trance  conditions  we  mold  and  make 
over  this  "astral"  body  in  accordance  with  our  imaginations, 
precisely  as  a  sculptor  molds  the  clay.  At  any  rate,  our  sub- 
consciousness has  the  power  to  project  from  it  masses  of 
substance,  and  to  cause  these  to  take  all  kinds  of  forms,  for 
example,  human  faces,  which  have  been  photographed  innum- 
erable times.  Or  the  body  can  shoot  out  long  rods  or  snaky 
projections,  which  lift  tables,  and  exert  force  which  has  been 
recorded  upon  pressure  instruments  and  weighed  by  scales. 

As  I  write,  a  friend  lends  me  a  fifteen-dollar  volume,  a 
translation  just  published  of  an  elaborate  work  by  Baron  von 
Schrenck-Notzing,  a  physician  of  Munich,  giving  minute  de- 
tails of  four  years'  experiments  in  this  field.  So  rigid  was 
this  investigator  in  his  efforts  to  exclude  fraud,  that  not  merely 
was  the  medium  stripped  and  sewed  up  in  black  tights,  but 
the  "cabinet"  in  which  she  sat  was  a  big  sack  of  black  cloth. 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  89 

everywhere  sewed  tight  by  machine.  Every  crevice  of  the 
medium's  body  was  searched  before  and  after  the  tests,  and 
every  inch  of  the  "cabinet"  gone  over.  The  investigators  sat 
within  a  couple  of  feet  of  the  medium,  and  would  draw  back 
the  curtains,  and  while  holding  her  hands  and  and  feet,  would 
watch  great  masses  of  filmy  gray  and  white  stuff  exude  from 
the  medium's  mouth,  from  her  armpits  and  breasts  and  sides. 
This  would  happen  in  red  light  of  a  hundred  candle  power, 
by  which  print  could  be  easily  read;  and  the  medium  would 
herself  illuminate  the  phenomena  with  a  red  electric  torch. 
The  investigators  would  be  privileged  to  examine  these 
"phantom"  forms,  to  touch  them  gently,  and  be  touched  by 
them — soft  and  slimy,  like  the  tongue  of  an  animal ;  but  some- 
times the  things  would  misbehave,  and  strike  them  in  the  eye, 
htirting  them. 

The  medium,  a  young  French  girl  living  in  the  home  of 
the  wife  of  a  well-known  French  playwright,  had  begun  with 
spiritualist  ideas,  but  came  to  take  a  matter-of-fact  attitude 
to  what  happened,  and  in  her  trances  would  labor  to  mold 
these  emanations  into  hands  or  faces,  as  requested  by  those 
present.  She  finally  succeeded  in  allowing  them  to  separate 
the  soft  mucous  stuff  from  her  body,  and  keep  it  for  chemical 
and  bacteriological  examination.  All  this  time  she  would  be 
surrounded  by  a  battery  of  cameras,  nine  at  once,  some  of 
them  inside  the  cabinet;  and  when  the  desired  emanation  was 
in  sight,  all  these  cameras  would  be  set  off  by  flashlight,  and 
in  the  book  you  have  over  two  hundred  such  photographs, 
showing  faces  and  hands  from  every  point  of  view.  There 
are  even  moving-pictures,  showing  the  material  coming  out 
of  her  mouth  and  going  back! 

It  is  evident  that  we  have  here  a  whole  universe  of  unex- 
plored phenomena;  and  it  seems  that  many  of  the  old-time 
superstitions  which  were  dumped  overboard  have  now  to  be 
dragged  back  into  the  boat  and  examined  in  the  light  of  new 
knowledge.  What  could  smack  more  of  magic  and  fraud 
than  crystal-gazing?  Yet  it  appears  that  the  subconsciousness 
has  power  to  project  an  image  of  its  hidden  memories  into  a 
crystal  ball,  where  it  may  be  plainly  seen.  We  find  so  well- 
recognized  an  authority  as  Dr.  Morton  Prince  using  this  method 
to  enable  one  of  the  many  Miss  Beauchamps  to  recall  inci- 
dents in  her  previous  life  which  were  otherwise  entirely  lost 
to  her.     Likewise  this  exploration  of  the  disintegration  of 


so  Mind  and  Body 

personality  enables  us  to  watch  in  the  making  all  the  phe- 
nomena of  trance  and  ecstasy  which  have  had  so  much  to  do 
with  the  making  of  religions.  We  know  now  how  Joan  of 
Arc  heard  the  "voices,"  and  we  can  make  her  hear  more  voices 
or  make  her  stop  hearing  voices,  as  we  prefer.  Also  we  know 
all  about  demons  and  "demoniac  possession."  We  can  cast 
out  demons — and  without  having  to  cause  them  to  enter  a 
herd  of  swine !  We  may  some  day  be  prepared  to  investigate 
the  wonder  stories  which  the  Yogis  tell  us,  about  their  ability 
to  leave  their  physical  bodies  in  a  trance,  and  to  appear  in 
England  at  a  few  moments'  notice  for  the  transaction  of  their 
spiritual  business! 

But  we  want  things  proven  to  us,  and  we  don't  want 
the  people  with  whom  we  work  to  be  animated  either  by 
religious  fanaticism  or  by  money  greed.  We  are  ready  to  un- 
limber  our  minds,  and  prepare  for  long  journeys  into  strange 
regions,  but  we  want  to  move  cautiously,  and  choose  our  route 
carefully,  and  be  sure  we  do  not  lose  our  way!  We  want 
to  deal  rationally  with  life ;  we  don't  want  to  make  wild  guesses, 
or  to  choose  a  complicated  and  unlikely  solution  when  a  simple 
one  will  suffice.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  we  must  be  alive  to 
the  danger  of  settling  down  on  our  little  pile  of  knowledge, 
and  refusing  to  take  the  trouble  to  investigate  any  more.  That 
is  a  habit  of  learned  men,  I  am  sorry  to  say ;  the  law  of  inertia 
applies  to  the  scientist,  as  well  as  to  the  objects  he  studies. 
The  scientists  of  our  time  have  had  to  be  prodded  into  con- 
sidering each  new  discovery  about  the  subconscious  mind,  pre- 
cisely as  the  scientists  of  Galileo's  time  had  to  be  prodded  to 
watch  him  drop  weights  from  the  tower  of  Pisa.  When  he 
told  them  that  the  earth  moved  round  the  sun  instead  of  the 
sun  round  the  earth,  they  tortured  him  in  a  dungeon  to  make 
him  take  it  back,  and  he  did  so,  but  whispered  to  himself, 
"And  yet  it  moves."  And  it  did  move,  of  course,  and  con- 
tinued to  move.  And  in  exactly  the  same  way,  if  it  be  true 
that  we  have  these  hidden  forces  in  us,  they  will  continue  to 
manifest  themselves,  and  masses  of  people  will  continue  to 
flock  to  Lily  Dale,  and  to  pay  out  their  hard-earned  money, 
until  such  a  time  as  our  learned  men  set  to  work  to  find  out 
the  facts  and  tell  us  how  we  can  utilize  these  forces  without 
the  aid  of  either  superstition  or  charlatanry. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

THE  POWERS  OF  THE  MIND 

(Sets  forth  the  fact  that  knowledge  is  freedom  and  ignorance 
is  slavery,  and  what  science  means  to  the  people.) 

We  have  now  completed  a  brief  survey  of  the  mind  and 
its  powers.  Whatever  we  may  have  proved  or  failed  to  prove, 
this  much  we  may  say  with  assurance:  the  reader  who  has 
followed  our  brief  sketch  attentively  has  been  disabused  of 
any  idea  he  may  have  held  that  he  knows  it  all;  and  this  is 
always  the  first  step  towards  knowledge. 

The  mind  is  the  instrument  whereby  our  race  has  lifted 
itself  out  of  beasthood.  It  is  the  instrument  whereby  we  hold 
ourselves  above  the  forces  which  seek  to  drag  us  down,  and 
whereby  we  shall  lift  ourselves  higher,  if  higher  we  are  to  go. 
How  shall  we  protect  this  precious  instrument?  How  shall 
we  complete  our  mastery  of  it?  What  are  the  laws  of  the 
conduct  of  the  mind? 

The  process  of  the  mind  is  one  of  groping  outward  after 
new  facts,  and  digesting  and  assimilating  them,  as  the  body 
gropes  after  and  digests  and  assimilates  food.  The  senses 
bring  us  new  impressions,  and  we  take  these  and  analyze  them, 
tear  them  into  the  parts  which  compose  them,  compare  them 
with  previous  sensations,  recognize  difference  in  things  which 
seem  to  be  alike,  and  resemblances  in  things  which  seem  to 
be  different ;  we  classify  them,  and  provide  them  with  names, 
which  are,  as  it  were,  handles  for  the  mind  to  grasp.  Above 
all,  we  seek  for  causes;  those  chains  of  events  which  make 
what  we  know  as  order  in  the  world  of  phenomena.  And 
when  the  mind  has  what  seems  to  be  a  cause,  it  proceeds  to 
test  it  according  to  methods  it  has  worked  out,  the  rules  and 
principles  of  experimental  science. 

It  is  a  comparatively  small  number  of  sensations  which 
the  body  brings  to  the  mind  of  itself ;  it  is  a  narrow  world  in 
which  we  should  live  if  our  minds  adopted  a  passive  attitude 
toward  Hfe.  But  some  minds  possess  what  we  call  curiosity ; 
they  set  out  upon  their  own  impulse  to  explore  life ;  they  dis- 
cover new  laws  and  make  new  experiences  and  new  sensa- 

91 


V 


92  Mind  and  Body 

tions  for  themselves.  The  mind  forms  an  idea,  and  at  first, 
after  the  fashion  of  the  ancient  Greek  philosophers,  it  glorifies 
that  idea  and  sets  it  in  the  seat  of  divinity.  But  presently 
comes  the  empirical  method,  which  refuses  authority  to  any 
idea  unless  it  can  stand  the  test  of  experiment,  and  prove 
that  it  corresponds  with  reality.  Nowadays  the  thinker 
amasses  his  facts,  and  forms  a  theory  to  explain  them,  and 
then  proceeds  to  try  out  this  theory  by  the  most  rigid  method 
that  he  or  his  critics  can  devise.  If  the  theory  doesn't  "work" 
— that  is,  if  it  doesn't  explain  all  the  facts  and  stand  all  the 
tests — it  is  thrown  away  like  a  worn-out  shoe.  So  little  by 
little  a  body  of  knowledge  is  built  up  which  is  real  knowledge : 
which  will  serve  us  in  our  daily  lives,  which  we  can  use  as 
foundation-stones  in  the  structure  of  our  civilization. 

By  this  method  of  research  man  is  expanding  his  universe 
beyond  anything  that  could  have  been  conceived  in  the  pre- 
scientific  days.  Hour  by  hour,  while  we  work  and  play  and 
sleep,  the  mind  of  our  race  is  discovering  new  worlds  in  which 
our  posterity  will  dwell.  For  uncounted  ages  man  walked 
upon  the  earth,  surrounded  by  infinite  swarms  of  bacterial  life 
of  whose  existence  he  never  dreamed.  The  invisible  rays  of 
the  spectrum  beat  upon  him,  and  he  knew  nothing  of  what  they 
did  to  him,  whetlier  good  or  evil.  He  lifted  his  head  and  saw 
vast  universes  of  suns,  in  comparison  with  which  his  world 
was  a  mere  speck  of  dust;  yet  to  him  these  universes  were 
globes  or  lanterns  which  some  divinity  had  hung  in  the  sky. 

One  of  the  most  fascinating  illustrations  of  how  the  mind 
runs  ahead  of  the  senses  is  the  story  of  the  planet  Uranus, 
which,  less  than  two  hundred  years  ago,  had  never  been  beheld 
by  the  eye  of  man.  A  mathematician  seated  in  his  study, 
working  over  the  observations  of  other  planets,  their  motions 
in  relation  to  their  mass  and  distance,  discovered  that  their 
behavior  was  not  as  it  should  be.  At  certain  times  none  of 
them  were  in  quite  the  right  place,  and  he  decided  that  this 
variation  must  be  due  to  the  existence  of  an  unknown  body. 
He  worked  out  the  problem  of  what  must  be  the  mass  and 
the  exact  orbit  of  this  body,  in  order  for  it  to  be  responsible 
for  the  variations  observed ;  and  when  he  had  completed  these 
calculations,  he  announced  to  the  astronomical  world,  "Turn 
your  telescopes  to  a  certain  spot  in  the  heavens  at  a  certain 
minute  of  a  certain  night,  and  you  will  find  a  new  planet  of 
a  certain  size."    And  so  for  the  first  time  the  human  senses 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  93 

became  aware  of  a  fact,  which  by  themselves  they  might  not 
have  discovered  in  all  eternity. 

Now,  the  importance  of  exact  knowledge  concerning  a  new 
planet  may  not  be  apparent  to  the  ordinary  man;  but  if  the 
thing  which  is  discovered  is,  for  example,  an  unknown  ray 
which  will  move  an  engine  or  destroy  a  cancer,  then  we  realize 
the  worth whileness  of  research,  and  the  masters  of  the  world's 
commerce  are  willing  to  give  here  and  there  a  pittance  for 
the  increase  of  such  knowledge.  But  men  of  science,  who 
have  by  this  time  come  to  a  sense  of  their  own  dignity  and 
importance,  understand  that  there  is  no  knowledge  about  reality 
which  is  useless,  no  research  into  nature  which  is  wasted. 
You  might  say  that  to  describe  and  classify  the  fleas  which 
inhabit  the  bodies  of  rats  and  ground-squirrels,  and  to  study 
under  the  microscope  the  bacteria  which  live  in  the  blood  of 
these  fleas — ^that  this  would  be  an  occupation  hardly  worthy 
of  the  divinity  that  is  in  man.  But  presently,  as  a  result  of 
this  knowledge  about  fleas  and  flea  diseases  being  in  existence 
and  available,  a  bacteriologist  discovers  the  secret  of  the  dread 
bubonic  plague,  which  hundreds  of  times  in  past  history  has 
wiped  out  a  great  part  of  the  population  of  Europe  and  Asia. 

Mark  Twain  tells  in  his  "Connecticut  Yankee"  how  his 
hero  was  able  to  overcome  the  wizard  Merlin,  because  he 
knew  in  advance  of  an  eclipse  of  the  sun.  And  this  was 
fiction,  of  course;  but  if  you  prefer  fact,  you  may  read  in 
the  memoirs  of  Houdin,  the  French  conjurer,  how  he  was 
able  to  bring  the  Arab  tribes  into  subjection  to  the  French 
government  by  depriving  the  great  chieftains  of  their  strength. 
He  gathered  them  into  a  theatre,  and  invited  their  mighty 
men  upon  the  stage,  and  there  was  an  iron  weight,  and  they 
were  able  to  lift  it  when  Houdin  permitted,  and  not  to  lift 
it  when  he  forbade.  These  noble  barbarians  had  never  heard 
of  the  electro-magnet,  and  could  not  conceive  of  a  force  that 
could  operate  through  a  solid  wooden  floor  beneath  their  feet. 
Such  things,  trivial  as  they  are,  serve  to  illustrate  the 
diflFerence  between  ignorance  and  knowledge,  and  the  power 
.  which  knowledge  gives.  The  man  who  knows  is  godlike  to 
those  who  do  not  know;  he  may  enslave  them,  he  may  do 
what  he  pleases  with  their  lives,  and  they  are  powerless  to 
help  themselves.  Anyone  who  would  help  them  must  begin 
by  giving  them  knowledge,  real  knowledge.  There  is  no  such 
thing  as  freedom  without  knowledge,  and  it  must  be  the  best 


94  Mind  and  Body 

knowledge,  it  must  be  new  knowledge ;  he  who  goes  against 
new  knowledge  armed  with  old  knowledge  is  like  the  Chinese 
who  went  out  to  meet  machine-guns  with  bows  and  arrows, 
and  with  umbrellas  over  their  heads. 

Once  upon  a  time  knowledge  was  the  prerogative  of  kings 
and  priests  and  ruling  castes;  but  this  supreme  power  has 
been  wrested  from  them,  and  this  is  the  greatest  step  in  human 
progress  so  far  taken,  "Seek  and  ye  shall  find,"  is  the  law 
concerning  knowledge  today.  "Knock,  and  it  shall  be  opened 
unto  you."  In  this,  my  Book  of  the  Mind,  I  say  to  you  that 
knowledge  is  your  priceless  birthright,  and  that  you  should 
repudiate  all  men  and  all  institutions  and  all  creeds  and  all 
formulas  which  seek  to  keep  this  heritage  from  you.  Beware 
of  men  who  bid  you  believe  something  because  it  is  told  you, 
or  because  your  fathers  believed  it,  or  because  it  is  written 
in  some  ancient  book,  or  embodied  in  some  ancient  ceremonial. 
Break  the  chains  of  these  venerable  spells;  and  at  the  same 
time  beware  of  the  modern  spells  which  have  been  contrived 
to  replace  them!  Beware  of  party  cries  and  shibboleths,  the 
idols  of  the  forum,  as  Plato  called  them,  the  prejudices  which 
are  set  as  snares  for  your  feet.  Beware  of  cant — ^that  para- 
phernalia of  noble  sentiments,  artificially  manufactured  by 
politicians  and  newspapers  for  the  purpose  of  blinding  you  to 
their  knaveries.  Remember  that  you  live  in  a  world  of  class 
conflicts ;  at  every  moment  of  your  life  your  mind  is  besieged 
by  secret  enemies,  it  is  exposed  to  poison  gas-clouds  deliberately 
released  by  people  who  seek  to  make  use  of  you  for  purposes 
which  are  theirs  and  not  yours.  In  the  fairy-tales  we  used 
to  love,  the  hero  was  provided  with  magic  protection  against 
the  perils  of  those  times;  but  what  hero  and  what  magic  will 
guard  the  modern  man  against  the  propaganda  of  militarism, 
nationalism,  and  capitalist  imperialism? 

The  mind  is  like  the  body  in  that  it  can  be  trained,  it  can 
be  taught  sound  habits,  its  powers  can  be  enormously  increased. 
There  are  many  books  on  mind  and  memory  training,  some 
of  which  are  useful,  and  some  of  which  are  trash.  There  is 
an  English  system  widely  advertised,  called  "Pelmanism,"  of 
which  I  have  personally  made  no  test,  but  it  has  won  endorse- 
ments of  a  great  many  people  who  do  not  give  their  en- 
dorsements lightly. 

This  is  the  subject  of  applied  psychology,  and  just  as  in 
medicine,  or  in  law,  or  in  any  of  the  arts,  there  is  a  vast  amount 


The  Book  or  the  Mind  95 

of  charlatanry,  but  there  is  also  genuine  knowledge  being 
patiently  accumulated  and  standardized.  When  the  United 
States  government  had  to  have  an  army  in  a  hurry  it  did 
not  make  its  millions  of  young  men  into  teamsters  or  aviators 
at  random.  It  used  the  new  methods  of  determining  reaction 
times,  and  testing  the  coordination  of  mind  and  body.  Recently 
I  visited  the  Whittier  Reform  School  in  California,  where 
delinquent  boys  are  educated  by  the  state.  A  boy  had  been 
set  to  work  in  the  tailor  shop,  and  it  had  been  found  that 
he  was  unable  to  make  the  buttons  and  the  buttonholes  of  a 
coat  come  in  the  right  place.  For  nine  years  the  state  of 
California,  and  before  it  the  state  of  Georgia,  had  been  labor- 
ing to  teach  this  boy  to  make  buttons  and  buttonholes  meet; 
the  effort  had  cost  some  five  thousand  dollars,  to  say  nothing 
of  all  the  coats  which  were  spoiled,  and  all  the  mental  suffer- 
ing of  the  victim  and  his  teachers.  Finally  someone  persuaded 
the  state  of  California  to  spend  a  few  thousand  dollars  and 
install  a  psychological  bureau  for  the  purpose  of  testing  all 
the  inmates  of  the  institution ;  so  by  a  half  hour's  examination 
the  fact  was  developed  that  this  boy  was  mentally  defective. 
Although  he  was  eighteen  years  old  in  body,  his  mind  was 
only  eight  years  old,  and  so  he  would  never  be  able  to  achieve 
the  feat  of  making  buttons  and  buttonholes  meet. 

This  is  a  new  science  which  you  may  read  about  in  Ter- 
man's  "The  Measurement  of  Intelligence."  By  testing  normal 
children,  it  is  established  that  certain  tasks  can  be  performed 
at  certain  ages.  A  child  of  three  can  point  to  his  eyes,  his 
nose  and  his  mouth ;  he  can  repeat  a  sentence  of  six  syllables, 
and  repeat  two  digits,  and  give  his  family  name.  Older  chil- 
dren are  asked  to  look  at  a  picture  and  then  tell  what  they  saw ; 
to  note  omissions  in  a  picture,  to  arrange  blocks  according 
to  their  weight,  to  arrange  words  into  sentences,  to  note  ab- 
surdities in  statements,  to  count  backwards,  and  to  make 
change.  Children  of  fifteen  are  asked  to  interpret  fables,  to 
reverse  the  hands  of  a  clock,  and  so  on.  Of  course  there  are 
always  variations ;  every  child  will  be  better  at  some  kinds  of 
tests  than  at  others.  But  by  having  a  wide  variety,  and 
taking  the  average,  you  establish  a  "mental  age"  for  the  child — 
which  may  be  widely  different  from  its  physical  age.  You 
may  find  some  whose  minds  have  stopped  growing  altogether, 
and  can  only  be  made  to  grow  by  special  methods  of  educa- 
tion.    Enlightened  communities  are  now  conducting  separate 


96  Mind  and  Body 

schools  for  defective  children — replacing  the  old-fashioned 
schoolmaster  who  wore  out  birch-rods  trying  to  force  poor 
little  wretches  to  learn  what  was  beyond  their  power. 

In  the  same  way  psychology  can  be  applied  in  industry, 
and  in  the  detection  of  crime.  Here,  too,  there  is  a  vast 
amount  of  "fake,"  but  also  the  beginning  of  a  science.  Our 
laws  do  not  as  yet  permit  the  use  of  automatic  writing  and 
the  hypnotic  trance  in  the  investigation  of  crime,  but  they 
have  sometimes  permitted  some  of  the  simpler  tests,  for 
example,  those  of  memory  association.  The  examiner  pre- 
pares a  list  of  a  hundred  names  of  objects,  and  reads  those 
names  one  after  another,  and  asks  the  person  he  is  investigat- 
ing to  name  the  first  thing  which  is  suggested  to  him  by  each 
word  in  turn.  "Engine"  will  suggest  "steam,"  or  perhaps  it 
will  suggest  "train" ;  "coat"  will  suggest  "trousers,"  or  per- 
haps it  will  suggest  "pocket,"  and  so  on.  The  examiner  holds 
a  stop-watch,  and  notes  what  fraction  of  a  second  each  one 
of  these  reactions  takes.  The  ordinary  man,  who  is  not  trying 
to  conceal  anything,  will  give  all  his  associations  promptly, 
and  the  reaction  times  will  be  approximately  alike.  But  sup- 
pose the  man  has  just  murdered  somebody  with  an  axe,  and 
buried  the  body  in  a  cellar  with  a  fire  shovel,  and  taken  a 
pocketbook,  and  a  watch,  and  a  locket,  and  a  number  of  various 
objects,  and  climbed  out  of  the  cellar  window  by  breaking  the 
glass ;  and  now  suppose  that  in  his  list  of  a  hundred  objects 
the  psychologist  introduces  unexpectedly  a  number  of  these 
things.  In  each  case  the  first  memory  association  of  the 
criminal  will  be  one  which  he  does  not  wish  to  give.  He  will 
have  to  find  another,  and  that  inevitably  takes  time.  One  or 
two  such  delays  might  be  accidental;  but  if  every  time  there 
is  any  suggestion  of  the  murder,  or  the  method  or  scene  of 
the  murder,  there  is  noticed  confusion  and  delay,  you  may  be 
sure  that  the  conscious  mind  is  interfering  with  the  subcon- 
scious mind.  The  difference  between  the  conscious  and  the 
subconscious  mind  is  always  possible  to  detect,  and  if  you  are 
permitted  to  be  thorough  in  your  experiments,  you  can  make 
certain  what  is  in  the  subconscious  mind  that  the  conscious 
mind  is  trying  to  conceal. 

Here,  as  everywhere  in  life,  knowledge  is  power,  and 
expert  knowledge  confers  mastery  over  the  shrewdest  un- 
trained mind.  The  only  trouble  is  that  under  our  present 
social  system  the  trained  mind  is  very  apt  to  be  working  in 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  97 

the  interest  of  class  privilege.  The  psychologist  who  is  em- 
ployed by  a  great  corporation,  or  by  a  police  department,  may 
be  as  little  worthy  of  trust  as  a  chemist  who  is  engaged  in 
making  poison  gases  to  be  used  by  capitalist  imperialism  for 
the  extermination  of  its  rebellious  slaves.  But  what  this  proves 
is  not  that  scientific  knowledge  is  untrustworthy,  but  merely 
that  the  workers  must  acquire  it,  they  must  have  their  own 
organizations  and  their  own  experiments  in  every  field.  To 
give  knowledge  to  the  masses  of  mankind,  slow  and  painful 
as  the  process  seems,  is  now  the  most  important  task  con- 
fronting the  enlightened  thinker. 

The  method  of  psychoanalysis  gives  us  also  much  insight 
into  the  phenomena  of  genius,  and  the  hope  that  we  may 
ultimately  come  to  understand  it.  At  present  we  are  em- 
barrassed because  genius  is  so  often  closely  allied  to  eccentric- 
ity ;  the  supernormal  appears  in  connection  with  the  subnormal 
— ^and  it  is  often  hard  to  tell  them  apart.  Great  poets  and 
painters  in  revolt  against  a  world  of  smug  commercialism, 
adopt  irresponsibility  as  their  religion ;  they  live  in  a  world  of 
their  own,  they  dress  like  freaks,  they  refuse  to  pay  their  debts, 
or  to  be  true  to  their  wives.  They  are  followed  by  a  host  of 
disciples,  who  adopt  the  defects  of  the  master  as  a  substitute 
for  his  qualities.  And  so  there  grows  up  a  perverted  notion  of 
what  genius  is,  and  wholly  false  standards  of  artistic  quality. 
There  is  nothing  mankind  needs  more  than  sure  and  exact 
tests  of  mental  superiority;  not  merely  the  ability  to  acquire 
languages  and  to  solve  mathematical  equations,  but  the  ability 
to  carry  in  the  mind  intense  emotions,  while  at  the  same  time 
shaping  and  organizing  them  by  the  logical  faculty,  selecting 
masses  of  facts  and  weaving  them  into  a  pattern  calculated  to 
awaken  the  emotion  in  others.  This  is  the  last  and  greatest 
work  of  the  human  spirit,  and  to  select  the  men  who  can  do  it, 
and  foster  their  activity,  is  the  ultimate  purpose  of  all  true 
science. 


CHAPTER  XVII 
THE  CONDUCT  OF  THE  MIND 

(Concludes  the  Book  of  the  Mind  with  a  study  of  how  to 
preserve  and  develop  its  powers  for  the  protection  of  our  lives 
and  the  lives  of  all  men.) 

Someone  wrote  me  the  other  day,  asking,  "When  is  the 
best  time  to  acquire  knowledge?"  I  answer,  "The  time  is 
now."  It  is  easier  to  learn  things  when  you  are  young,  but 
you  cannot  be  young  when  you  want  to  be,  and  if  you  are 
old,  the  best  time  to  acquire  knowledge  is  when  you  are  old. 
It  is  true  that  the  brain-cells  seem  to  harden  like  the  body, 
and  it  is  less  easy  for  them  to  take  on  new  impressions;  but 
it  can  be  done,  and  just  as  Seneca  began  to  learn  Greek  at 
eighty,  I  know  several  old  men  whom  the  recent  war  has 
shaken  out  of  their  grooves  of  thought  and  compelled  to  deal 
with  modern  ideas. 

But  if  you  are  young,  then  so  much  the  better !  Then  the 
divine  thrill  of  curiosity  is  keenest;  then  your  memory  is 
fresh,  and  can  be  trained;  your  mind  is  plastic,  and  you  can 
form  sound  habits.  You  can  teach  yourself  to  respect  truth 
and  to  seek  it,  you  can  teach  yourself  accuracy,  open-minded- 
ness,  flexibility,  persistence  in  the  search  for  understanding. 

First  of  all,  I  think,  is  accuracy.  Learn  to  think  straight ! 
Let  your  mind  be  as  a  sharp  scalpel,  penetrating  unrealities 
and  falsehoods,  cutting  its  way  to  the  facts.  When  you  set 
out  to  deal  with  a  certain  subject,  acquire  mastery  of  it,  so 
that  you  can  say,  "I  know."  And  yet,  never  be  too  sure  that 
you  know!  Never  be  so  sure,  that  you  are  not  willing  to 
consider  new  facts,  and  to  change  your  way  of  thinking  if  it 
should  be  necessary.  I  look  about  me  at  the  world,  and  see 
tigers  and  serpents,  dynamite  and  poison  gas  and  forty-two 
centimeter  shells — ^yet  I  see  nothing  in  the  world  so  deadly  to 
men  as  an  error  of  the  mind.  Look  at  the  mental  follies 
about  you!  Look  at  the  prejudices,  the  delusions,  the  lies 
deliberately  maintained — and  realize  the  waste  of  it  all,  the 
pity  of  it  all! 

Every  man,  it  seems,  has  his  pet  delusions,  which  he  hugs 

98  " 


The  Book  of  the  Mind  9^ 

to  his  bosom  and  loves  because  they  are  his  own.  K  you  try 
to  deprive  him  of  those  delusions,  it  is  as  though  you  tore 
from  a  woman's  arms  the  child  she  has  borne.  I  have  written 
a  book  called  "The  Profits  of  Religion,"  and  never  a  week 
passes  that  there  do  not  come  to  me  letters  from  people  who 
tell  me  they  have  read  this  book  with  pleasure  and  profit, 
they  are  grateful  to  me  for  teaching  them  so  much  about  the 
follies  and  delusions  of  mankind,  and  it  is  all  right  and  all 
true,  save  for  two  or  three  pages,  in  which  I  deal  with  the 
special  hobby  which  happens  to  be  their  hobby!  What  I  say 
about  all  the  other  creeds  is  correct — ^but  I  fail  to  understand 
that  the  Mormon  religion  is  a  dignified  and  inspired  religion, 
a  gift  from  on  high,  and  if  only  I  would  carefully  study  the 
"Book  of  Mormon,"  I  would  realize  my  error!  Or  it  is  all 
right,  except  what  I  say  about  the  Christian  Scientists,  or  the 
Theosophists,  or  perhaps  one  particular  sect  of  the  The- 
osophists,  who  are  different  from  the  others.  Today  there  lies 
upon  my  desk  a  letter  from  a  man  who  has  read  many  of  my 
books,  and  now  is  grief-stricken  because  he  must  part  com- 
pany from  me;  he  discovers  that  I  permit  myself  to  speak 
disrespectfully  about  the  Seventh  Day  Adventist  religion, 
whereas  he  is  prepared  to  show  the  marvels  of  biblical  prophecy 
now  achieving  themselves  in  the  world.  How  could  any  save 
a  divinely  revealed  religion  have  foreseen  the  present  move- 
ment to  establish  the  Sabbath  by  law?  Yes,  and  presently  I 
shall  see  the  last  atom  of  the  prophecy  fulfilled — ^there  will  be 
a  death  penalty  for  failure  to  obey  the  Sabbath  law! 

Cultivate  the  great  and  precious  virtue  of  open-mindedness. 
Keep  your  thinking  free,  not  merely  from  outer  compulsions, 
but  from  the  more  deadly  compulsions  of  its  own  making — 
from  prejudices  and  superstitions.  The  prejudices  and  super- 
stitions of  mankind  are  like  those  diseased  mental  states  which 
are  discovered  by  the  psychoanalyst ;  what  he  calls  a  "complex"^ 
in  the  subconscious  mind,  a  tangle  or  knot  which  is  a  center 
of  disturbance,  and  keeps  the  whole  being  in  a  state  of  con- 
fusion. Each  group  of  men,  each  sect  or  class,  have  their 
precious  dogmas,  their  shibboleths,  their  sacred  words  and 
stock  phrases  which  set  their  whole  beings  aflame  with  fanati- 
cism. They  have  also  their  phobias,  their  words  of  terror, 
which  cannot  be  spoken  in  their  presence  without  causing  a 
brain-storm. 

At  present  the  dread  word  of  our  time  is  "Communist.'* 


100  Mind  and  Body 

You  can  scarcely  say  the  word  without  someone  telephoning 
for  the  police.  And  yet,  when  you  meet  a  Communist,  what 
is  he?  A  worn  and  fragile  student,  who  has  thought  out  a 
way  to  make  the  world  a  better  place  to  live  in,  and  whose 
crime  is  that  he  tells  others  about  his  idea!  Or  perhaps  you 
belong  to  the  other  side,  and  then  your  word  of  terror  is  the 
word  "Capitalist."  You  meet  a  Capitalist,  and  what  do  you 
find  ?  Very  likely  you  find  a  man  who  is  kindly,  generous  in  his 
personal  impulses,  but  bewildered,  possibly  a  little  frightened, 
still  more  irritated  and  made  stubborn.  So  you  realize  that 
nearly  all  men  are  better  than  the  institutions  and  systems 
under  which  they  live ;  you  realize  the  urgent  need  of  applying 
your  reasoning  powers  to  the  problem  of  social  reorganization. 

Cultivate  also,  in  the  affairs  of  your  mind,  the  ancient 
virtue  of  humility.  There  is  an  oldtime  poem,  which  perhaps 
was  in  your  school  readers,  "Oh,  why  should  the  spirit  of 
mortal  be  proud?"  My  answer  is,  for  innumerable  reasons. 
The  spirit  of  mortal  should  be  proud  and  must  be  proud  be- 
cause life  throbs  in  it,  and  because  life  is  a  marvelous  thing, 
and  the  excitement  of  life  is  perpetual.  Yesterday  I  met  a 
young  mother ;  and  of  what  avail  is  all  the  pessimism  of  poets 
against  the  pride  of  a  young  mother?  "Oh!"  she  cried,  and 
her  face  lighted  up  with  delight.  "He  said  'Goo'!"  Yes,  he 
said  "Goo !" — and  never  since  the  world  began  had  there  been 
a  baby  which  had  achieved  that  marvel.  Presently  it  will  be, 
"Look,  look,  he  is  trying  to  walk!"  Then  he  will  be  getting 
marks  at  school,  and  presently  he  will  be  displaying  signs  of 
genius.  Always  it  will  take  an  effort  of  the  mind  of  that  young 
mother  to  realize  that  there  are  other  children  in  the  world 
as  wonderful  as  her  own ;  and  perhaps  it  will  take  many  gen- 
erations of  mental  effort  before  there  will  be  young  mothers 
capable  of  realizing  that  some  other  child  is  more  wonderful 
than  her  child. 

In  other  words,  it  is  by  a  definite  process  of  broadening 
our  minds  that  we  come  to  realize  the  lives  of  others,  to  trans- 
fer to  them  the  interest  we  naturally  take  in  our  own  lives, 
and  to  admit  them  to  a  state  of  equality  with  ourselves.  This 
is  one  of  the  services  the  mind  must  render  for  us;  it  is  the 
process  of  civilizing  us.  And  there  is  another,  and  yet  more 
important  task,  which  is  to  make  clear  to  us  the  fact  that  we 
do  not  altogether  make  this  life  of  ours,  that  there  is  a  uni- 
verse of  power  and  wisdom  which  is  not  ours,  but  on  which 


The  Book  of  the  IMixd  101 

we  draw.  "The  fear  of  the  Lord  is  the  beginning  of  wisdom," 
said  the  Psalmist,  We  know  now  that  fear  is  an  ugly  emotion, 
destructive  to  life;  but  it  may  be  purified  and  made  into  a  true 
humility,  which  every  thinking  man  must  feel  towards  life  and 
its  miracles. 

Also  the  man  will  have  joy,  because  it  is  given  him  to 
share  the  high,  marvelous  adventure  of  being.  To  the  pleasures 
of  the  body  there  is  a  limit,  and  it  comes  quickly;  but  the 
pleasures  of  the  mind  are  infinite,  and  no  one  who  truly  under- 
stands ttiem  can  have  a  moment  of  boredom  in  life.  To  a 
man  who  possesses  the  key  to  modern  thought,  who  knows 
what  knowledge  is  and  where  to  look  for  it,  the  life  of  the 
mind  is  a  panorama  of  delight  perpetually  unrolled  before 
him.  To  the  minds  of  our  ancestors  there  was  one  universe ; 
but  to  our  minds  there  are  many  universes,  and  new  ones  con- 
tinually discovered. 

The  only  question  is,  which  one  will  you  choose?  Will 
you  choose  the  imiverse  of  outer  space,  the  material  world  of 
infinity?  Consider  the  smallest  insect  that  you  can  see,  crawl- 
ing upon  the  surface  of  the  earth;  small  as  that  insect  is  in 
relation  to  the  earth,  it  is  not  so  small,  by  millions  of  times, 
as  is  the  earth  in  relation  to  the  universe  made  visible  to  our 
eyes  by  the  high-power  telescope,  plus  the  photographic 
camera,  plus  the  microscope.  If  you  want  to  know  the  miracles 
of  this  world  of  space,  read  Arrhenius*  "The  Life  of  the 
Universe,"  or  Simon  Newcomb's  "Sidelights  on  Astronomy." 
Suffice  it  here  to  say  that  we  have  a  chemistry  of  the  stars,  by 
means  of  the  spectroscope ;  that  we  can  measure  the  speed  and 
direction  of  stars  by  the  same  means ;  that  we  have  learned 
to  measure  the  size  of  the  stars,  and  are  studying  stars  which 
we  cannot  even  see !  And  then  along  comes  Einstein,  with 
his  theories  of  "relativity,"  and  makes  it  seem  that  we  have  to 
revise  a  great  part  of  this  knowledge  to  allow  for  the  fact 
that  not  merely  everv^hing  we  look  at,  but  also  we  ourselves, 
are  flying  every  which  way  through  space ! 

Or  will  you  choose  the  universe  of  the  atom,  the  infinity 
of  the  material  world  followed  the  other  way,  so  to  speak? 
Big  as  is  the  universe  in  relation  to  our  world,  and  big  as  is 
our  world  in  relation  to  the  insect  that  crawls  on  it,  the  insect 
is  bigger  yet  in  relation  to  the  molecules  which  compose  its 
body ;  and  these  in  turn  are  millions  of  millions  of  times  bigger 
than  the  atoms  which  compose  them ;  and  then,  behold,  in  the 


102  Mind  and  Body 

atom  there  are  millions  of  millions  of  electrons — ^tiny  particles 
of  electric  energy!  We  cannot  see  these  infinitely  minute 
things,  any  more  than  we  can  see  the  electricity  which  runs 
our  trolley  cars ;  but  we  can  see  their  effects,  and  we  can  count 
and  measure  them,  and  deal  with  them  in  complicated  mathe- 
matical formulas,  and  be  just  as  certain  of  their  existence  as 
we  are  of  the  dust  under  our  feet.  If  you  wish  to  explore 
this  wonderland,  read|  Duncan's  "The  New  Knowledge,"  or 
Dr.  Henry  Smith  Wilfiams*  "Miracles  of  Science."  1 

Or  will  you  choose  the  universe  of  the  subconscious,  our 
racial  past  locked  up  in  the  secret  chambers  of  our  mind  ?  Or 
will  you  choose  the  universe  of  the  superconscious,  the  infinity 
of  genius  manifested  in  the  arts?  By  the  device  of  art  man 
not  merely  creates  new  life,  he  tests  it,  he  weighs  it  and 
measures  it,  he  tries  experiments  with  it,  as  the  physicist  with 
the  molecule  and  the  astronomer  with  light.  He  finds  out  what 
works,  and  what  does  not  work,  and  so  develops  his  moral 
and  spiritual  muscles,  training  himself  for  his  task  as  maker 
of  life. 

Written  words  can  give  but  a  feeble  idea  of  the  wonders 
that  are  found  in  these  enchanted  regions  of  the  mind.  Here 
are  palaces  of  splendor  beyond  imagining,  here  are  temples 
with  sacred  shrines,  and  treasure-chambers  full  of  gold  and 
priceless  jewels.  Into  these  places  we  enter  as  Aladdin  in 
the  ancient  tale ;  we  are  the  masters  here,  and  all  that  we  see  is 
ours.  He  who  has  once  got  access  to  it — he  possesses  not  merely 
the  magic  lamp,  he  possesses  all  the  wonderful  fairy  properties 
of  all  the  tales  of  our  childhood.  His  is  the  Tarnhelm  and 
the  magic  ring  which  gives  him  power  over  his  foes ;  his  is  the 
sword  Excalibur  which  none  can  break,  and  the  silver  bullet 
which  brings  down  all  game,  and  the  flying  carpet  upon  which 
to  travel  over  the  earth,  and  the  house  made  of  ginger-bread, 
and  the  three  wishes  which  always  come  true,  and  the  philter 
of  love,  and  the  elixir  of  youth,  and  the  music  of  the  spheres, 
and — ^who  knows,  some  day  he  may  come  upon  heaven,  with 
St.  Peter  and  his  golden  key,  and  the  seraphim  singing,  and 
the  happy  blest  conversing! 


PART  TWO 

THE    BOOK    OF    THE    BODY 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  UNITY   OF  THE  BODY 

(Discusses  the  body  as  a  whole,  and  shows  that  health  is 
not  a  matter  of  many  different  organs  and  functions,  but  is  one 
problem  of  one  organism.) 

The  reader  who  has  followed  our  argument  this  far  will 
understand  that  we  are  seldom  willing  to  think  of  the  body 
as  separate  from  the  mind.  The  body  is  a  machine,  to  be 
sure,  but  it  is  a  machine  that  has  a  driver,  and  while  it  is 
possible  for  a  sound  machine  to  have  a  drunken  and  irrespon- 
sible driver,  such  a  machine  is  not  apt  to  remain  sound  very 
long.  Frequently,  when  there  is  trouble  with  the  machine, 
we  find  the  fault  to  be  with  the  driver;  in  other  words,  we 
find  that  what  is  needed  for  the  body  is  a  change  in  the 
mind. 

If  you  wish  to  have  a  sound  body,  and  to  keep  it  sound 
as  long  as  possible,  the  first  problem  for  you  to  settle  is 
■what  you  want  to  make  of  your  life ;  you  must  have  a  pur- 
pose, and  confront  the  tasks  of  life  with  energy  and  interest. 
What  is  the  use  of  talking  about  health  to  a  man  who  has  no 
moral  purpose?  He  may  answer — indeed,  I  have  heard  vic- 
tims of  alcoholism  answer — ^"Let  me  alone.  I  have  a  right 
to  go  to  hell  in  my  own  way." 

I  am  aware,  of  course,  that  the  opposite  of  the  proposition 
is  equally  true.  A  man  cannot  enjoy  much  mental  health 
while  he  has  a  sick  body.  It  is  a  good  deal  like  the  old 
question.  Which  comes  first,  the  hen  or  the  egg?  The  mind 
and  the  body  are  bound  up  together,  and  you  may  try  to  deal 
with  each  by  turn,  but  always  you  find  yourself  having  to 
deal  with  both.  Most  physicians  have  a  tendency  to  over- 
look the  mind,  and  Christian  Scientists  make  a  religion  of 
overlooking  the  body,  and  each  pays  the  penalty  in  greatly 
reduced  effectiveness. 

My  first  criticism  of  medical  science,  as  it  exists  today, 
is  that  it  has  a  tendency  to  concentrate  upon  organs  and 
functions,  and  to  overlook  the  central  unity  of  the  system. 
You  will  find  a  doctor  who  specializes    in  the  stomach  and  its 

105 


I'^S  Mind  and  Body 

diseases,  and  is  apt  to  talk  as  if  the  stomach  were  a  thing 
that  went  around  in  the  world  all  by  itself.  He  will  discuss 
the  question  of  what  goes  into  your  stomach,  and  overlook 
to  point  out  to  you  that  your  stomach  is  nourished  by  your 
blood-stream,  which  is  contiVsJled  by  your  nervous  system, 
which  in  turn  is  controlled  by  hope,  by  ambition,  by  love,  by 
all  the  spiritual  elements  of  your  being,  A  single  pulse  of 
anger  or  of  fear  may  make  more  trouble  with  the  contents 
of  your  stomach  than  the  doctor's  pepsins  and  digestive  fer- 
ments can  remedy  in  a  week. 

Of  course,  you  may  do  yourself  some  purely  local  injury, 
and  so  for  a  time  have  a  purely  local  problem.  You  may 
smash  your  finger,  and  that  is  a  problem  of  a  finger;  but 
neglect  it  for  a  few  days,  and  let  blood  poison  set  in,  and 
you  will  be  made  aware  that  the  human  body  is  one  organ- 
ism, and  also  that,  in  spite  of  any  metaphysical  theories  you 
may  hold,  your  body  does  sometimes  dominate  and  control 
your  minii. 

Some  one  has  said  that  the  blood  is  the  life;  and  cer- 
tainly t-he  blood  is  both  the  symbol  and  the  instrument  of 
the  body's  unity.  The  blood  penetrates  to  all  parts  of  the 
body  and  maintains  and  renews  them.  If  the  blood  is  normal, 
the  work  of  renewal  does  not  often  fail.  If  there  is  a  fail- 
ure of  renewal — that  is,  a  disease — we  shall  generally  find 
an  abnormal  condition  of  the  blood.  The  distribution  of  the 
blood  is  controlled  by  the  heart,  a  great  four-chambeVed 
pump.  One  chamber  drives  the  blood  to  the  lungs,  a  mass 
of  fine  porbus  membranes,  where  it  comes  into  contact  with 
the  air,  and  gives  off  the  poisons  which  it  has  accumulated 
in  its  course  through  the  body,  and  takes  up  a  fresh  supply 
of  oxygen.  By  another  chamber  of  the  heart  the  blood  is 
then  sucked  out  of  the  lungs,  and  by  the  next  chamber  it 
is  driven  to  every  corner  of  the  body.  It  takes  to  every  cell 
of  the  body  the  protein  materials  which  are  necessary  for  the 
body's  renewal,  and  also  the  fuel  materials  which  are  to  be 
burned  to  supply  the  body's  energy;  also  it  takes  some  thirty 
million  millions  of  microscopic  red  corpuscles  which  are  the 
carriers  of  oxygen,  and  an  even  greater  number  of  the  white 
corpuscles,  which  are  the  body's  scavengers,  its  defenders 
from  invasion  by  outside  germs. 

There  are  certain  outer  portions  of  the  body,  such  as  nails 
and  the  scales  of  the  skin,  which  are  dead  matter,  produced 


The  Book  of  the  Body  107 

by  the  body  and  pushed  out  from  it  and  no  longer  nourished 
by  the  blood.  But  all  the  still  living  parts  of  the  body  are 
fed  at  every  instant  by  the  stream  of  life.  Each  cell  in  the 
body  takes  the  fuel  which  it  needs  for  its  activities,  and  com- 
bines it  with  the  oxygen  brought  by  the  red  corpuscles;  and 
when  the  task  of  power-production  has  been  achieved,  the 
cell  puts  back  into  the  blood-stream,  not  merely  the  carbon 
dioxide,  but  many  complex  chemical  products — ammonia,  uric 
acid,  and  the  "fatigue  poisons,"  indol,  phenol  and  skatol.  The 
blood-stream  bears  these  along,  and  delivers  some  to  the 
sweat  glands  to  be  thrown  out,  and  some  to  the  kidneys,  and 
the  rest  to  the  lungs. 

All  of  this  complicated  mass  of  activities  is  in  normal 
health  perfectly  regulated  and  timed  by  the  nervous  system. 
You  lie  down  to  sleep,  and  your  muscles  rest,  and  the  vital 
activities  slow  up,  your  heart  beats  only  faintly ;  but  let  some- 
thing frighten  you,  and  you  sit  up,  and  these  faculties  leap 
into  activity,  your  heart  begins  to  pound,  driving  a  fresh 
supply  of  blood  and  vital  energy.  You  jump  up  and  run,  and 
these  organs  all  set  to  work  at  top  speed.  If  they  did  not 
do  so,  your  muscles  would  have  no  fresh  energy;  they  would 
become  paralyzed  by  the  fatigue  poisons,  and  you  would  be, 
as  we  say,  exhausted. 

All  the  rest  of  the  body  might  be  described  as  a  shelter 
and  accessory  to  the  life-giving  blood-stream;  all  the  rest  is 
the  blood-stream's  means  of  protecting  itself  and  renewing 
itself.  The  stomach  is  to  digest  and  prepare  new  blood  ma- 
terial, the  teeth  are  to  crush  it  and  grind  it,  the  hands  are  to 
seize  it,  the  eyes  are  to  see  it,  the  brain  is  to  figure  out  its 
whereabouts.  Man,  in  his  egotism,  imagines  his  little  world 
as  the  center  of  the  universe;  but  the  wise  old  fellow  who 
lives  somewhere  deep  in  our  subconsciousness  and  looks  after 
the  welfare  of  our  blood-stream — ^he  has  far  better  reason 
for  believing  that  all  our  consciousness  and  our  personality 
exist  for  him! 

Now,  disease  is  some  failure  of  this  blood-stream  properly 
to  renew  itself  or  properly  to  protect  itself  and  its  various 
subsidiary  organs.  When  you  find  yourself  with  a  disease, 
you  call  in  a  doctor;  and  unless  this  doctor  is  a  modern  and 
progressive  man,  he  makes  the  mistake  of  assuming  that  the 
disease  is  in  the  particular  organ  where  it  shows  itself.  You 
have,  let  us  say,  "follicular  tonsilitis."     (These  medical  men 


108  Mind  and  Body 

have  a  love  for  long  names,  which  have  the  effect  of  awing 
you,  and  convincing  you  that  you  are  in  desperate  need  of 
attention.)  Your  throat  is  sore,  your  tonsils  are  swollen 
and  covered  with  white  spots;  so  the  doctor  hauls  out  his 
little  black  bag,  and  makes  a  swab  of  cotton  and  dips  it,  say 
in  lysol,  and  paints  your  tonsils.  He  knows  by  means  of  the 
microscope  that  your  tonsils  are  covered  and  filled  with  a 
mass  of  foreign  germs  which  are  feeding  upon  them ;  also  he 
knows  that  lysol  kills  these  germs,  and  he  gives  you  a  gargle 
/for  the  same  purpose,  puts  you  to  bed,  and  gradually  the 
swelling  goes  down,  and  he  tells  you  that  he  has  cured  you, 
and  sends  you  a  bill  for  services  rendered.  But  maybe  the 
swelling  does  not  go  down ;  maybe  it  gets  worse  and  you  die. 
Then  he  tells  your  family  that  nature  was  to  blame.  Nature 
is  to  blame  for  your  death,  but  it  never  occurs  to  anyone  to 
ask  what  nature  may  have  had  to  do  with  your  recovery. 

I  do  not  know  how  many  thousands  of  diseases  medical 
science  has  now  classified.  And  for  each  separate  disease 
there  are  complex  formulas,  and  your  system  is  pumped  full 
of  various  mineral  and  vegetable  substances  which  have  been 
found  to  affect  it  in  certain  ways.  Perhaps  you  have  a  fever ; 
then  we  give  you  a  substance  which  reduces  the  temperature 
of  your  blood-stream.  It  never  occurs  to  us  to  reflect  that 
maybe  nature  has  some  purpose  of  her  own  in  raising  the 
temperature  of  the  blood ;  that  this  might  be,  so  to  speak,  the 
heat  of  conflict,  a  struggle  she  is  waging  to  drive  out  invading 
germs;  and  that  possibly  it  would  be  better  for  the  tempera- 
ture to  stay  up  until  the  battle  is  over.  Or  maybe  the  heart 
is  failing;  then  our  medical  man  is  so  eager  to  get  something 
into  the  system  that  he  cannot  wait  for  the  slow  process  of 
the  mouth  and  the  stomach,  he  shoots  some  strychnine  di- 
rectly into  the  blood-stream.  It  does  not  occur  to  him  to 
reflect  that  maybe  the  heart  is  slowing  up  because  it  is  over- 
loaded with  fatigue  poisons,  of  which  it  cannot  rid  itself,  and 
that  the  effect  of  stimulating  it  into  fresh  activity  will  be 
to  leave  it  more  dangerously  poisoned  than  before. 

We  are  dealing  here  with  processes  which  our  ancient 
mother  nature  has  been  carrying  on  for  a  long  time,  and 
which  she  very  thoroughly  understands.  We  ought,  there- 
fore, to  be  sure  that  we  know  what  is  the  final  effect  of  our 
actions ;  more  especially  we  ought  to  be  sure  that  we  under- 
stand the  cause  of  the  evil,  so  that  we  may  remove  it,  and 


The  Book  of  the  Body  109 

not  simply  waste  our  time  treating  symptoms,  putting  plasters 
on  a  cancer.  This  is  the  fundamental  problem  of  health; 
and  in  order  to  make  clear  what  I  mean,  I  am  going  to  begin 
by  telling  a  personal  experience,  a  test  which  I  made  of  med- 
ical science  some  twelve  or  fourteen  years  ago,  in  connection 
with  one  of  the  simplest  and  most  external  of  the  body's 
problems — the  hair.  First  I  will  tell  you  what  medical  science 
was  able  to  do  for  my  hair,  and  second  what  I  myself  was 
able  to  do,  when  I  put  my  own  wits  to  work  on  the  problem. 

I  had  been  overworking,  and  was  in  a  badly  run  down 
condition.  I  was  having  headaches,  insomnia,  ulcerated  teeth, 
many  symptoms  of  a  general  breakdown;  among  these  I 
noticed  that  my  hair  was  coming  out.  I  decided  that  it  was 
foolish  to  become  bald  before  I  was  thirty,  and  that  I  would 
take  a  little  time  off,  and  spend  a  little  money  and  have  my 
hair  attended  to.  I  did  not  know  where  to  go,  but  I  wanted 
the  best  authority  available,  so  I  wrote  to  the  superintendent 
of  the  largest  hospital  in  New  York,  asking  him  for  the  name 
of  a  reliable  specialist  in  diseases  of  the  scalp.  The  super- 
intendent replied  by  referring  me  to  a  certain  physician,  who 
was  the  hospital's  "consulting  dermatologist,"  and  I  went  to 
see  this  physician,  whose  home  and  office  were  just  off  Fifth 
Avenue. 

He  examined  my  scalp,  and  told  me  that  I  had  dandruff 
in  my  hair,  and  that  he  would  give  me  a  prescription  which 
would  remove  this  dandruff  and  cause  my  hair  to  stop  fall- 
ing out.  He  charged  me  ten  dollars  for  the  visit,  which  in 
those  days  was  more  money  than  it  is  at  present.  Being  of 
an  inquiring  turn  of  mind,  I  tried  to  get  my  money's  worth 
by  learning  what  there  was  to  learn  about  the  human  hair. 
I  questioned  this  gentleman,  and  he  told  me  that  the  hair 
is  a  dead  substance,  and  that  its  only  life  is  in  the  root.  He 
explained  that  barbers  often  persuade  people  to  have  their 
hair  singed,  to  keep  it  from  falling  out,  and  that  this  was 
an  utterly  futile  procedure,  and  likewise  all  shampooing  and 
massage,  which  only  caused  the  hair  to  fall  out  more  quickly. 
It  was  better  even  not  to  wash  the  hair  too  often.  All  that 
was  needed  was  a  mixture  of  chemicals  to  kill  the  dandruff 
germs;  and  so  I  had  the  prescription  put  up  at  a  drug  store, 
and  for  a  couple  of  years  I  religiously  used  it  according  to 
order,  and  it  had  upon  my  hair  absolutely  no  effect  what- 
ever. 


110  Mind  and  Body 

So  here  was  the  best  that  medical  science  could  do.  But 
still,  I  did  not  want  to  be  bald,  so  I  went  among  the  health 
cranks — ^people  who  experiment  without  license  from  the  med- 
ical schools.  Also,  I  experimented  upon  myself,  and  now  I 
know  something  about  the  human  hair,  something  entirely 
different  from  what  the  rich  and  successful  "consulting  der- 
matologist" taught  me,  but  which  has  kept  me  from  becoming 
entirely  bald. 

First,  the  human  hair  is  made  by  the  body,  and  it  is  made, 
like  everything  else  in  the  body,  out  of  the  blood-stream.  It 
is  perfectly  true  that  the  dandruff  germ  gets  into  the  roots, 
and  makes  trouble,  and  that  the  process  of  killing  this  germ 
can  be  helped  by  chemicals ;  but  it  does  not  take  a  ten-dollar 
prescription,  it  only  takes  ten  cents'  worth  of  borax  and  salt 
from  the  corner  grocery,  (Put  a  little  into  a  saucer,  moisten 
it,  rub  it  into  the  scalp,  and  wash  it  out  again.)  But  infi- 
nitely more  important  than  this  is  the  fact  that  healthy  hair 
roots  are  a  product  of  healthy  blood,  and  that  unhealthy 
blood  produces  sick  hair  roots,  which  cannot  hold  in  the 
hair.  Most  important  of  all  is  the  fact  that  in  order  to  make 
healthy  hair  roots  the  blood  must  flow  fully  and  freely  to 
these  hair  roots;  whereas  I  had  been  accustomed  for  many 
hours  every  day  of  my  life  to  clap  around  my  scalp  a  tight 
band  which  almost  entirely  stopped  the  circulation  of  the 
life-giving  blood  to  my  sick  hair  roots.  In  other  words,  by 
wearing  civilized  hats,  I  was  literally  starving  my  hair  to 
death. 

As  soon  as  I  realized  this  I  took  off  my  civilized  hat,  and 
have  never  worn  one  since.  As  a  rule,  I  don't  wear  anything. 
On  the  few  occasions  when  I  go  into  the  city,  I  wear  a  soft 
cap.  Now  and  then  I  experience  inconvenience  from  this — 
the  elevator  boy  in  some  apartment  house  tells  me  to  come 
in  by  the  delivery  entrance,  or  the  porter  of  a  sleeping-car 
will  not  let  me  in  at  all.  I  remember  discussing  these  em- 
barrassments with  Jack  London,  who  went  even  further  in 
his  defiance  of  civilization,  and  wore  a  soft  shirt.  It  was 
his  custom,  he  said,  to  knock  down  the  elevator  boys  and 
sleeping-car  porters.  I  answered  that  that  might  be  all  right 
for  him,  because  he  could  do  it;  whereas  I  was  reduced  to 
the  painful  expedient  of  explaining  politely  why  I  went  about 
without  the  customary  symbols  of  my  economic  superiority. 

The   "consulting  dermatologist"   had  very   solemnly   and 


The  Book  of  the  Body  111 

elaborately  warned  me  concerning  the  danger  of  moving  my 
hair  too  violently,  and  thus  causing  it  to  come  out;  but  now 
my  investigations  brought  out  the  fact  that  moving  the  hair, 
that  is,  massaging  the  scalp,  increases  the  flow  of  blood  to 
the  hair  roots,  and  further  increases  resistance  to  disease.  As 
for  causing  the  hair  to  fall  out,  I  discovered  that  the  more 
quickly  you  cause  a  hair  to  fall  out,  the  greater  is  the  chance 
of  your  getting  another  hair.  If  a  hair  is  allowed  to  die  in  the 
root,  it  kills  that  root  forever,  but  if  it  is  pulled  out  before 
it  dies,  the  root  will  make  a  new  hair.  Every  "beauty  parlor" 
specialist  knows  this;  she  knows  that  if  a  hair  is  pulled,  it 
grows  back  bigger  and  stronger  than  ever,  and  so  to  pull 
out  hair  is  the  last  thing  you  must  do  if  you  want  to  get  rid 
of  hairs! 

I  know  a  certain  poet,  who  happens  to  have  been  well- 
endowed  with  physic£il  graces  by  o<ur  mother  nature.  He 
finds  it  worth  while  to  preserve  them — they  being  accessory 
to  those  amorous  experiences  which  form  so  large  a  part  of 
the  theme  of  poetry.  Anyhow,  this  poet  values  his  beautiful 
hair,  and  you  will  see  him  sitting  in  front  of  his  fireplace, 
reading  a  book,  and  meanwhile  his  fingers  run  here  and  there 
over  his  head,  and  he  grabs  a  bunch  of  hair  and  pulls  and 
twists  it.  He  has  cultivated  this  habit  for  many  years,  and 
as  a  result  his  hair  is  as  thick  and  heavy  as  the  "fuzzy- 
wuzzies"  of  Kipling's  poem.  It  is  a  favorite  sport  of  this 
poet  to  lure  some  rival  poet  into  a  contest.  He  will  mildly 
suggest  that  they  take  hold  of  each  other's  hair  and  have  a 
tug  of  war.  The  rival  poet,  all  unsuspecting,  will  accept  the 
challenge,  and  my  friend  will  proceed  to  haul  him  all  over 
the  place,  to  the  accompaniment  of  howls  of  anguish  from 
the  victim,  and  howls  of  glee  from  the  victor,  who  has,  of 
course,  a  scalp  as  tough  as  a  rhinoceros  hide. 

I  am  not  a  poet,  and  it  is  not  important  that  I  should  be 
beautiful,  and  I  have  been  too  busy  to  remember  to  pull  my 
hair ;  but  by  giving  up  tight  hats,  and  by  limiting  the  amount 
of  my  overworking,  I  have  managed  to  keep  what  hair  I  had 
left  when  the  hair  specialist  had  got  througn  with  me.  I  tell 
this  anecdote  at  the  beginning  of  my  discussion  of  health, 
because  it  illustrates  so  well  the  factors  which  appear  in 
every  case  of  disease,  and  which  you  must  understand  in 
seeking  to  remedy  the  trouble. 

We  have  a  phrase  which  has  come  down  to  us  from  the 


112  Mind  and  Body 

ancient  Latins,  "vis  medicatrix  naturae,"  which  means  the 
healing  power  of  nature.  So  long  ago  men  realized  that  it 
is  our  ancient  mother  who  heals  our  wounds,  and  not  the 
physician.  Out  of  this  have  grown  the  cults  of  "nature  cure" 
enthusiasts;  and  according  to  the  fashion  of  men,  they  fly 
to  extremes  just  as  unreasonable  and  as  dangerous  as  those 
of  the  "pill  doctors"  they  are  opposing.  I  have  in  mind  a 
man  who  taught  me  probably  more  than  any  other  writer  on 
health  questions,  and  with  whom  I  once  discussed  the  sub- 
ject of  typhoid,  how  it  seemed  to  affect  able-bodied  men  in 
the  prime  of  their  physical  being.  This,  of  course,  was  con- 
trary to  the  theories  of  nature  cure,  and  my  friend  had  a 
simple  way  of  meeting  the  argument — ^he  refused  to  believe 
it.  He  insisted  that,  as  with  all  other  germ  infections,  it  must 
be  a  question  of  bodily  tone ;  no  germ  could  secure  lodgment 
in  the  human  body  unless  the  body's  condition  was  reduced, 

"But  how  can  you  be  sure  of  that?"  I  argued.  "You 
know  that  if  you  go  into  the  jungle,  you  are  not  immune 
against  the  scorpion  or  the  cobra  or  the  tiger.  There  is  noth- 
ing in  all  nature  that  is  safe  against  every  enemy.  What  pos- 
sible right  have  you  to  assert  that  you  are  immune  against 
every  enemy  which  can  attack  your  blood-stream?" 

We  shall  find  here,  as  we  find  nearly  always,  that  the 
truth  lies  somewhere  between  the  extremes  of  two  warring 
schools.  Our  race  has  been  existing  for  a  long  time  in  a  cer- 
tain environment,  and  its  very  existence  implies  superiority 
to  that  environment.  The  weaklings,  for  whom  its  hardships 
were  too  severe,  were  weeded  out;  hostile  parasites  invaded 
their  blood-stream  and  conquered  and  devoured  them.  But 
those  who  survived  were  able  to  make  in  their  blood-stream 
the  substances  known  as  anti-bodies,  the  "opsonins,"  to  help 
the  white  blood  corpuscles  devour  the  germs.  As  the  result 
of  their  victory,  we  carry  those  anti-bodies  in  our  system, 
which  gives  us  immunity  to  those  particular  diseases,  or  at 
any  rate  gives  us  the  ability  to  have  the  diseases  without 
dying.  Every  time  we  go  into  a  street  car,  we  take  into 
our  throat  and  lungs  the  germs  of  tuberculosis.  Examina- 
tion proves  that  we  carry  around  with  us  in  our  mouths  the 
germs  of  all  the  common  throat  and  nose  diseases,  colds, 
bronchitis,  tonsilitis.  No  matter  what  precautions  we  might 
take,  no  matter  if  we  were  to  gargle  our  throats  every  few 
minutes,  we  could  never  get  rid  of  such  germs.     And  they 


The  Book  of  the  Body  113 

"wage  continual  war  upon  the  body's  defenses;  they  batter  in 
vain  upon  the  gates  of  our  sound  health.  But  take  us  to 
some  new  environment  to  which  we  are  not  accustomed ;  take 
us  to  Panama  in  the  old  days  of  yellow  fever,  or  take  us  to 
Africa,  and  let  the  tsetse  fly  bite  us,  and  infect  us  with 
"sleeping  sickness."  Here  are  germs  to  which  our  systems 
are  not  accustomed;  and  before  them  we  are  as  helpless  as 
the  ancient  knights-at-arms,  who  had  conquered  everything 
in  sight,  and  ruled  the  continent  of  Europe  for  many  hundreds 
of  years,  but  were  wiped  off  the  earth  by  a  chemist  mixing 
gunpowder. 

In  the  Marquesas  Islands,  in  the  South  Seas,  there  lived 
a  beautiful  and  happy  race  of  savages,  believed  to  have  been 
descended,  long  ages  ago,  from  Aryan  stock.  From  the  point 
of  view  of  physical  perfection,  they  were  an  ideal  race,  living 
a  blissful  outdoor  life,  which  you  may  read  about  in  Mel-j^*'' 
ville's  "Typee,"  and  in  O'Brien's  "White  Shadows  in  the 
South  Seas."  This  race  conformed  to  all  the  requirements 
of  the  nature  enthusiast.  They  went  practically  naked,  their 
houses  were  open  all  the  time,  they  lived  on  the  abundant 
fruits  of  the  earth.  To  be  sure,  they  were  cannibals,  but 
this  was  more  a  matter  of  religious  ceremony  than  of  diet. 
They  ate  their  war  captives,  but  this  was  only  after  battle, 
and  not  often  enough  to  count,  one  way  or  the  other,  in 
matters  of  health.  They  had  lived  for  uncounted  ages  in 
perfect  harmony  with  their  environment;  they  were  happy 
and  free ;  and  certainly,  if  such  a  thing  were  possible  to  human 
beings,  they  should  have  been  proof  against  germs.  But  a 
ship  came  to  one  of  these  islands,  and  put  ashore  a  sailor 
dying  of  tuberculosis,  and  in  a  few  years  four-fifths  of  the 
population  of  this  island  had  been  wiped  out  by  the  disease. 
What  tuberculosis  left  were  finished  by  syphilis  and  small- 
pox, and  today  the  Marquesans  are  an  almost  extinct  race. 

But  there  is  another  side  to  the  argiiment — ^and  one  more 
•favorable  to  the  nature  cure  enthusiast.  We  civilized  men, 
"by  soft  living,  by  self-indulgence  and  lack  of  exercise,  may 
reduce  the  tone  of  our  body  too  far  below  the  standard  which 
our  ancestors  set  for  us ;  and  then  the  common  disease  germs 
get  us,  then  we  have  colds,  sore  throats,  tuberculosis.  The 
nature  cure  advocate  is  perfectly  right  in  saying  that  there 
is  no  use  treating  such  diseases;  the  thing  is  to  restore  the 
body  to  its  former  tone,  so  that  we  may  be  superior  to  our 
normal  environment  and  its  strains. 


114  Mind  and  Body 

You  know  the  poem  of  the  "One  Hoss  Shay,**  which  was 
so  perfectly  built  in  every  part  that  it  ran  for  fifty  years  and 
then  collapsed  all  at  once  in  a  heap.  But  the  human  body  is 
not  built  that  way.  It  always  has  one  or  more  places  which 
are  weaker  than  the  others,  and  which  first  show  the  effects 
of  strain.  In  one  person  it  will  take  the  form  of  dyspepsia, 
in  another  it  will  be  headaches,  in  another  colds,  in  another 
decaying  teeth,  in  another  hardening  of  the  arteries  or  stiffen- 
ing of  the  joints.  But  whatever  the  symptoms  may  be,  the 
fundamental  cause  is  always  the  same,  an  abnormal  condi- 
tion of  the  blood-stream,  and  a  consequent  lowering  of  the 
body's  tone.  Therefore,  studying  any  disease  and  its  cure, 
you  have  first  the  emergency  question,  are  there  any  germs 
lodged  in  the  body,  and  if  so,  how  can  you  destroy  them? 
As  part  of  the  problem,  you  have  to  ask  whether  your  blood- 
stream is  normal,  and  if  not,  what  are  the  methods  by  which 
you  can  make  it  normal  and  keep  it  so?  Also  you  have  to 
ask,  what  are  the  reasons  why  your  trouble  manifests  itself 
in  this  or  that  particular  organ?  Is  there  some  weakness  or 
defect  there,  and  can  the  defect  be  remedied,  or  can  your 
habits  be  changed  so  as  to  reduce  the  strain  on  that  organ? 
Are  there  any  measures  you  can  take  to  increase  the  flow  of 
blood  to  that  organ,  and  to  promote  its  activity  ?  In  the  study 
of  your  health,  you  will  find  that  circumstances  differ,  and 
the  importance  of  one  factor  or  the  other  will  vary ;  but  you 
will  seldom  find  any  problem  in  which  all  these  factors  do 
not  enter,  and  you  will  seldom  find  an  adequate  remedy  unless 
you  take  all  the  factors  into  consideration. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

EXPERIMENTS  IN  DIET 

(Narrates  the  author's  adventures  in  search  of  health,  and 
his  conclusions  as  to  what  to  eat.) 

Students  of  the  body  assure  us  that  every  particle  of 
matter  which  composes  it  is  changed  in  the  course  of  seven 
years.  It  is  obvious  that  everything  that  is  a  part  of  the 
body  has  at  some  time  to  be  taken  in  as  food ;  so  the  problem 
of  our  diet  today  is  the  problem  of  what  our  body  shall  con- 
sist of  seven  years  from  now,  and  probably  a  great  deal  sooner. 

I  begin  this  discussion  by  telling  my  own  personal  ex- 
periences with  food.  I  am  not  going  to  recommend  my  diet 
for  anyone  else;  because  one  of  the  first  things  I  have  to 
say  about  the  subject  is  that  every  human  individual  is  a 
separate  diet  problem.  But  I  am  going  to  try  to  establish  a 
few  principles  for  your  guidance,  and  more  especially  to 
point  out  the  commonest  mistakes.  I  tell  about  my  own  mis- 
takes, because  it  happens  that  I  know  them  more  intimately. 

I  was  brought  up  in  the  South,  where  it  is  the  custom  of 
people  to  give  a  great  deal  of  time  and  thought  to  the  sub- 
ject of  eating.  Among  the  people  I  knew  it  was  always  taken 
for  granted  that  there  should  be  at  least  one  person  in  the 
kitchen  devoting  all  her  time  to  the  preparing  of  delicious 
things  for  the  family  to  eat.  This  person  was  generally  a 
negress,  and,  needless  to  say,  she  knew  nothing  about  the 
chemistry  of  foods,  nothing  about  their  constituents  or  nu- 
tritive qualities.  All  she  knew  was  about  their  taste ;  she  had 
been  trained  to  prepare  them  in  ways  that  tasted  best,  and 
■was  continually  being  advised  and  exhorted  and  sometimes 
scolded  by  the  ladies  of  the  family  on  this  subject.  At  the 
table  the  family  and  the  guests  never  failed  to  talk  about 
the  food  and  its  taste,  and  not  infrequently  the  cook  would  be 
behind  the  door  listening  to  their  comments ;  or  else  she  would 
■wait  until  after  the  meal,  for  the  report  which  somebody 
■would  bring  her. 

In  addition  to  this,  the  ladies  of  the  family  were  skilled 
in  what  is  called  "fancy  cooking."    They  did  not  bother  with 

115 


116  Mind  and  Body 

the  meats  and  vegetables,  but  they  mixed  batter  cakes,  and 
made  all  kinds  of  elaborate  desserts,  and  exchanged  these 
treasures  and  the  recipes  for  them  with  other  ladies  in  the 
neighborhood.  In  addition  to  this,  there  were  certain  periods 
of  the  week  and  of  the  year  especially  devoted  to  the  pre- 
paring and  consuming  of  great  quantities  of  foods.  Once 
every  seven  days  the  members  of  the  family  expressed  their 
worship  of  their  Creator  by  eating  twice  as  much  as  usual; 
and  at  another  time  they  celebrated  the  birth  of  their  Redeemer 
by  overeating  systematically  for  a  period  of  two  or  three 
weeks.  Needless  to  say,  of  course,  the  children  brought  up 
in  such  an  environment  all  had  large  appetites  and  large  stom- 
achs, and  their  susceptibility  to  illness  was  recognized  by 
the  setting  apart  for  them  of  a  whole  classification  of  troubles 
— "children's  diseases,"  they  were  called.  In  addition  to 
children's  diseases,  there  were  coughs  and  colds  and  sore 
throats  and  pains  in  the  stomach  and  constipation  and  diarrhea, 
which  the  children  shared  with  their  adults. 

I  had  a  little  more  than  my  share  of  all  these  troubles. 
Always  a  doctor  would  be  sent  for,  and  always  he  was  wise 
and  impressive,  and  always  I  was  impressed.  He  gave  me 
some  pills  or  a  bottle  of  liquid,  a  teaspoonf  ul  every  two  hours, 
•or  something  like  that — I  can  hear  the  teaspoon  rattle  in  the 
glass  as  I  write.  I  had  a  profound  respect  for  each  and  every 
one  of  those  doctors.  He  was  wisdom  walking  about  in 
trousers,  and  whenever  he  came,  I  knew  that  I  was  going  to 
get  well ;  and  I  did,  which  proved  the  case  completely. 

Then  I  grew  up,  and  at  the  age  of  eighteen  or  nineteen 
became  possessed  of  a  desire  for  knowledge,  and  took  to 
reading  and  studying  literally  every  minute  of  the  day  and  a 
good  part  of  the  night.  I  seldom  let  myself  go  to  sleep  before 
two  o'clock  in  the  morning,  and  was  always  up  by  seven  and 
ready  for  work  again.  I  did  this  for  ten  years  or  so,  until 
nature  brought  me  to  a  complete  stop.  During  these  ten  years 
I  was  a  regular  experiment  station  in  health;  that  is,  I  had 
every  kind  of  common  ailment,  and  had  it  over  and  over 
again,  so  that  I  could  try  all  the  ways  of  curing  it,  or  failing 
to  cure  it,  and  keep  on  trying  until  I  was  sure,  one  way  or 
the  other.  I  came  recently  upon  a  wonderful  saying  by  John 
Burroughs,  which  will  be  appreciated  by  every  author.  "This 
writing  is  an  unnatural  business.  It  makes  your  head  hot 
and  your  feet  cold,  and  it  stops  the  digesting  of  your  food." 


The  Book  of  the  Body  117 

This  trouble  with  my  digestion  began  when  I  was  writing 
my  second  novel,  camping  out  on  a  lonely  island  at  the  foot 
of  Lake  Ontario.  I  went  to  see  a  doctor  in  a  nearby  town, 
and  he  talked  learnedly  about  dyspepsia.  The  cause  of  it,  he 
said,  was  failure  of  the  stomach  to  secrete  enough  pepsin,  and 
the  remedy  was  to  take  artificial  pepsin,  obtained  from  the 
stomach  of  a  pig.  He  gave  me  this  pig-pepsin  in  a  bottle 
of  red  liquid,  and  I  religiously  took  some  after  each  meal. 
It  helped  for  a  time;  but  then  I  noticed  that  it  helped  less 
and  less.  I  got  so  that  a  simple  meal  of  cold  meat  and  boiled 
potatoes  would  stay  in  my  stomach  for  hours,  in  spite  of  any 
amount  of  the  pig-pepsin ;  I  would  lie  about  in  misery,  because 
I  wanted  to  work,  and  my  accursed  stomach  would  not  let 
me. 

All  the  time,  of  course,  I  was  using  my  mind  on  this 
problem,  groping  for  causes.  I  found  that  the  trouble  was 
worse  if  I  worked  immediately  after  eating.  I  found  also 
that  it  was  worse  when  I  was  writing  books.  When  I  got 
sufficiently  desperate,  I  would  stop  writing  books  and  go  off 
on  a  hunting  trip.  I  would  tramp  twenty  miles  a  day  over 
the  mountains,  looking  for  deer,  and  I  would  come  back  at 
night  too  tired  to  think,  and  in  a  week  or  two  every  trace 
of  my  trouble  would  be  gone.  So  my  life  regimen  came  to 
be — first  the  writing  of  a  book,  and  then  a  hunting  trip  to 
get  over  the  effects  of  it.  But  as  time  went  on,  alas,  I  noticed 
that  the  recuperation  was  more  slow  and  less  certain.  The 
working  times  grew  shorter,  and  the  hunting  times  grew 
longer,  until  finally  I  had  got  to  a  point  where  I  couldn't 
work  at  all ;  I  would  go  to  pieces  in  a  few  days  if  I  tried  it. 
It  was  apparently  the  end  of  my  stomach,  and  the  end  of  my 
sleeping,  and  the  end  of  my  writing  books.  My  teeth  were 
decaying,  not  merely  outside  but  inside;  I  would  have  ab- 
scesses, and  most  frightful  agonies  to  endure.  I  would  lie 
awake  all  night,  and  it  would  seem  to  me  that  I  could  feel 
my  body  going  to  pieces — an  extremely  depressing  sensation ! 

I  had  been  trymg  experiments  all  this  time.  I  had  been 
going  to  one  doctor  after  another,  and  had  got  to  realize  that 
the  doctors  only  treated  symptoms ;  they  treated  the  "diseases" 
"when  they  appeared — but  nobody  ever  told  you  how  to  keep 
the  "diseases"  from  appearing.  Why  could  there  not  be  a 
doctor  who  would  look  you  over  thoroughly,  and  tell  you 
everything  that  was  wrong  with  you,  and  how  to  set  it  right  ? 


118  Mind  and  Body 

A  doctor  who  would  tell  you  exactly  how  to  live,  so  that  you 
might  keep  well  all  the  time!  I  was  studying  economics,  and 
becoming  suspicious  of  my  fellow  man ;  it  occurred  to  me  that 
possibly  it  might  be  embarrassing  to  a  doctor,  if  he  cured 
all  his  patients,  and  taught  them  how  to  live,  so  that  none  of 
them  would  ever  have  to  come  to  him  again.  It  occurred  to 
me  that  possibly  this  might  be  the  reason  why  "preventive 
medicine,"  constructive  health  work,  was  getting  so  little  at- 
tention from  the  medical  fraternity. 

Two  things  that  plagued  me  were  headache  and  constipa- 
tion, and  they  were  obviously  related.  For  constipation,  the 
•world  had  one  simple  remedy;  you  "took  something"  every 
night  or  every  morning,  and  thought  no  more  about  it.  My 
stout  and  amiable  grandmother  had  drunk  a  glass  of  Hunyadi 
water  every  morning  for  the  last  thirty  or  forty  years,  and 
that  she  finally  died  of  "fatty  degeneration  of  the  heart" 
was  not  connected  with  this  in  the  mind  of  anyone  who  knew 
her.  As  for  the  headaches,  people  would  tell  you  this,  that, 
and  the  other  remedy,  and  I  would  try  them — ^that  is,  unless 
they  happened  to  be  drugs.  I  was  getting  more  and  more 
shy  of  drugs.  I  had  some  blessed  instinct  which  saved  me 
from  stimulants  and  narcotics.  I  had  never  used  tea,  coffee, 
alcohol  or  tobacco,  and  in  my  worst  periods  of  suffering  I 
never  took  to  putting  myself  to  sleep  with  chloral,  or  to  stop- 
ping my  headaches  with  phenacetin. 

At  the  end  of  six  or  eight  years  of  purgatory,  I  came  upon 
a  prospectus  of  the  Battle  Creek  Sanitarium.  This  seemed 
to  me  exactly  what  I  wanted ;  this  was  constructive,  it  dealt 
with  the  body  as  a  whole.  So  I  spent  a  couple  of  months 
at  the  "San,"  and  paid  them  something  like  a  thousand  dol- 
lars to  tell  me  all  they  could  about  myself. 

The  first  thing  they  told  me  was  that  meat-eating  was 
killing  me.  It  was  perfectly  obvious,  was  it  not,  that  meat 
is  a  horrible  feeding  place  for  germs,  that  rotten  meat  is 
dreadfully  offensive,  and  likewise  digested  meat — consider  the 
excreta  of  cats,  for  example!  I  listened  solemnly  while 
Doctor  Kellogg  read  off  the  numbers  of  billions  of  bacteria 
per  gram  in  the  contents  of  the  colon  of  a  carnivorous  person. 
It  certainly  seemed  proper  that  the  author  of  "The  Jungle" 
should  be  a  vegetarian,  so  I  became  one,  and  did  my  best  to 
persuade  myself  that  I  enjoyed  the  taste  of  the  patent  meat- 
substitutes  which  are  served  in  hundred  calory  portions  in 
the  big  Sanitarium  dining-room. 


The  Book  of  the  Body  119 

There  also  I  met  Horace  Fletcher,  and  learned  to  chew 
every  particle  of  food  thirty-two  times,  and  often  more.  I 
exercised  in  the  Sanitarium  gymnasiimi,  and  watched  the  ster- 
ilized dancing — the  men  with  the  men  and  the  women  with 
the  women.  I  was  patiently  polite  with  the  Seventh  Day 
Adventist  religion,  and  laid  in  a  supply  of  postage  stamps  on 
Friday  evening.  Finally,  and  most  important  of  all,  I  went 
once  a  day  to  the  "treatment  rooms,"  and  had  my  abdomen 
doctored  alternately  with  hot  cloths  and  ice.  By  this  means 
I  kept  up  a  flow  of  blood  in  the  intestinal  tract,  and  stimu- 
lated these  organs  to  activity ;  so  my  constipation  was  relieved, 
and  my  headaches  were  less  severe — so  long  as  I  stayed  at 
the  Sanitarium,  and  was  boiled  and  frozen  once  every  day. 
But  when  I  left  the  Sanitarium,  and  abandoned  the  treat- 
ments, the  troubles  began  to  return.  Meantinrke,  however,  I 
had  written  a  book  in  praise  of  vegetarianism — a  book  which 
has  got  into  the  libraries,  and  cannot  be  got  out  again! 

I  went  on  to  a  new  variety  of  health  crank,  the  real 
"nature  cure"  practitioners.  Vegetarianism  was  not  enough, 
they  insisted ;  the  evil  had  begun  long  before,  when  man  first 
ruined  his  food  and  destroyed  its  nutritive  value  by  means  of 
fire.  There  was  only  one  certain  road  to  health,  and  that  was 
by  the  raw  food  route,  the  monkey  and  squirrel  diet.  I  had 
gone  out  to  California  for  a  winter's  rest,  and  decided  I  would 
give  this  plan  a  thorough  trial.  For  five  months  I  lived  by 
myself,  and  the  only  cooked  food  I  ate  was  shredded  wheat 
biscuit.  For  the  rest  I  lived  on  nuts  and  salads  and  fresh  and 
dried  fruits;  and  during  this  period  I  enjoyed  such  health 
as  I  had  never  known  in  my  life  before.  I  had  literally  not  a 
single  ailment.  I  was  not  merely  well,  but  bubbling  over 
with  health.  I  had  a  friend  who  said  it  cheered  him  up  just 
to  see  me  walk  down  the  street. 

I  thought  that  it  was  entirely  the  raw  food,  and  that  I 
had  solved  the  problem  forever;  but  I  overlooked  the  fact 
that  during  those  five  months  I  had  done  no  hard  brain  work, 
no  writing.  I  went  back  to  writing  again,  and  things  began 
to  go  wrong ;  my  wonderful  raw  foods  took  to  making  trouble 
in  my  stomach — ^and  I  assure  you  that  until  you  try,  you  have 
no  idea  the  amount  of  trouble  that  can  be  made  in  your 
stomach  by  a  load  of  bananas  and  soaked  prunes  which  has 
gone  wrong!  For  a  year  or  two  I  agonized ;  I  could  not  give 
up  my  wonderful  raw  food  diet,  because  I  had  always  before 


120  Mind  and  Body 

me  the  vision  of  those  months  in  CaUfornia,  and  could  not 
understand  why  it  was  not  that  way  again. 

But  the  time  came  when  I  would  eat  a  meal  of  raw  food, 
and  for  hours  afterwards  my  stomach  would  feel  like  a  blown- 
up  football.  Then  somebody  gave  me  a  book  by  Dr.  Salis- 
bury on  the  subject  of  the  meat  diet.  Of  all  the  horrible 
things  in  the  world,  a  meat  diet  sounded  to  me  the  worst; 
I  had  been  a  vegetable  enthusiast  for  three  years,  and  thought 
of  eating  meat  as  you  would  think  of  cannibalism.  But  there 
has  never  been  a  time  in  my  life  when  I  would  not  hear 
something  new,  and  give  it  a  trial  if  it  sounded  well;  so  I 
read  the  books  of  Doctor  Salisbury,  which  have  long  been 
out  of  print,  and  have  been  curiously  neglected  by  the  med- 
ical profession.  Salisbury  was  a  real  pioneer,  an  experi- 
menter. He  wrote  in  the  days  before  the  germ  theory,  and 
so  missed  his  guess  regarding  tuberculosis,  but  he  perceived 
that  most  of  the  common  diseases  are  caused  by  dietetic  errors, 
and  he  set  to  work  to  prove  it.  He  showed  that  hog  cholera 
and  army  diarrhea  are  the  same  disease,  and  come  from  the 
same  cause.  He  took  a  squad  of  men  and  fed  them  on  army 
biscuit  for  two  or  three  weeks,  until  they  were  nearly  dead, 
and  then  he  put  them  on  a  diet  of  lean  beef  and  completely 
cured  them  in  a  few  days.  He  did  this  same  thing  with  one 
kind  of  food  after  another,  and  in  each  case  he  would  bring 
his  men  as  near  to  death  as  he  dared,  and  then  he  would  cure 
them.  He  showed  that  meat  is  the  only  food  which  contains 
all  the  elements  of  nutrition,  the  only  food  upon  which  a 
person  can  live  for  an  unlimited  period.  As  Salisbury  said, 
"Beef  is  first,  mutton  is  second,  and  the  rest  nowhere." 

It  was  his  idea  that  tuberculosis  of  the  lungs  is  caused 
by  spores  of  fermenting  starch  clogging  the  minute  blood 
vessels.  He  claimed  that  there  is  an  early  stage  of  tubercu- 
losis, in  which  the  spores  are  floating  in  the  blood  stream ;  he 
put  large  numbers  of  patients  upon  a  diet  of  lean  beef, 
ground  and  cooked,  and  he  cured  them  of  tuberculosis,  and 
if  one  of  them  would  break  the  diet  and  yield  to  a  craving 
for  starch  or  sugar,  Salisbury  claimed  that  he  could  find  it 
out  an  hour  or  two  later  by  examining  a  drop  of  their  blood 
under  the  microscope.  In  his  books  he  described  vividly  the 
effects  of  an  excess  of  starch  and  sugar  in  the  diet.  He 
called  it  "making  a  yeast-pot  of  your  stomach";  and  you 
can  imagine  how  that  hit  my  stomach,  full  of  half  digested 
bananas  and  prunes! 


The  Book  of  the  Body  121 

I  tried  the  Salisbury  diet,  and  satisfied  myself  of  this 
one  fact,  that  lean  meat  is  for  brain-workers  the  most  easily 
assimilated  of  all  foods.  Salisbury  claimed  that  you  could 
not  overeat  on  meat,  but  I  do  not  believe  there  is  any  food 
you  cannot  overeat  on,  nor  do  I  believe  that  anyone  should 
try  to  live  on  one  kind  of  food.  We  are  by  nature  omnivorous 
animals.  Our  digestive  tracts  are  similar  to  those  of  hogs 
and  monkeys,  which  eat  all  varieties  of  food  they  can  get.  One 
of  the  common  errors  of  the  nature  cure  enthusiast  is  to  cite 
the  monkey  and  the  squirrel  as  fruit  and  nut-eating  animals, 
•when  the  fact  is  that  monkeys  and  squirrels  eat  meat  when 
they  can  get  it,  and  the  ardor  with  which  they  go  bird-nesting 
is  evidence  enough  that  they  crave  it.  If  there  is  any  race  of 
man  which  is  vegetarian,  you  will  find  that  it  is  from  neces- 
sity alone.  The  beautiful  South  Sea  Islanders,  who  are  the 
theme  of  the  raw  fooders'  ecstasy,  spend  a  lot  of  their  time 
catching  fish,  and  sometimes  they  kill  a  pig,  and  celebrate 
the  event  precisely  as  Christians  celebrate  the  birth  of  their 
Redeemer. 

From  this  you  may  be  able  to  guess  my  conclusions,  as 
the  result  of  much  painful  blundering  and  experimenting. 
So  far  as  diet  is  concerned,  I  belong  to  no  school;  I  have 
learned  something  from  each  one,  and  what  I  have  learned 
from  a  trial  of  them  all  is  to  be  shy  of  extreme  statements 
and  of  hard  and  fast  rules.  To  my  vegetarian  friends  who 
argue  that  it  is  morally  wrong  to  take  sentient  life,  I  answer 
that  they  cannot  go  for  a  walk  in  the  country  without  com- 
mitting that  offense,  for  they  walk  on  innumerable  bugs  and 
worms.  We  cannot  live  without  asserting  our  right  to  sub- 
ject the  lower  forms  of  life  to  our  purposes;  we  kill  in- 
numerable germs  when  we  swallow  a  glass  of  grape  juice,  or 
for  that  matter  a  glass  of  plain  water.  I  shall  be  much  sur- 
prised if  the  advance  of  science  does  not  some  day  prove  to 
us  that  there  are  rudimentary  forms  of  consciousness  in  all 
vegetable  life;  so  we  shall  justify  the  argument  of  Mr. 
Dooley,  who  said,  in  reviewing  "The  Jungle,"  that  he  could 
not  see  how  it  was  any  less  a  crime  to  cut  off  a  young  tomato 
in  its  prime,  or  to  murder  a  whole  cradleful  of  baby  peas  in 
the  pod ! 

There  is  no  question  that  meat-eating  is  inconvenient,  ex- 
pensive, and  dirty.  I  have  no  doubt  that  some  day  we  shall 
know  enough  to  be  able  to  find  for  every  individual  a  diet 


122  Mind  and  Body 

which  will  keep  him  at  the  top  of  his  power,  without  the 
maintenance  of  the  slaughter-house.  But  we  do  not  possess 
that  knowledge  at  present;  at  least,  I  personally  do  not  pos- 
sess it.  I  happen  to  be  one  of  those  individuals — ^there  are 
many  of  them — with  whom  milk  does  not  agree;  and  if  you 
rule  out  milk  and  meat,  you  find  yourself  compelled  to  get 
a  great  deal  of  your  protein  from  vegetable  sources,  such  as 
peas,  beans  and  nuts.  All  these  contain  a  great  deal  of  starch, 
and  thus  there  is  no  way  you  can  arrange  your  diet  to  escape 
an  excess  of  starch.  Excess  of  starch,  so  my  experience  has 
convinced  me,  is  the  deadliest  of  all  dietetic  errors.  It  is  also 
the  commonest  of  errors,  the  cause,  not  merely  of  the  com- 
mon throat  and  nose  infections,  but  of  constipation,  and  like- 
wise of  diarrhea,  of  anemia,  and  thus,  through  the  weakening 
of  the  blood  stream,  of  all  disorders  that  spring  from  this 
source — deca3dng  teeth  and  rheumatism,  boils,  bad  complexion, 
and  tuberculosis.  Starch  foods  are  the  cheapest,  therefore 
they  form  the  common  diet  of  the  poor,  and  are  responsible 
for  the  diseases  of  undernourishment  to  which  the  poor  are 
liable. 

On  the  other  hand,  of  course,  there  are  perfectly  definite 
diseases  of  ovemourishment ;  high  blood  pressure,  which  cul- 
minates in  apoplexy;  kidney  troubles,  which  result  from  the 
inability  of  these  organs  to  eliminate  all  the  waste  matter  that 
is  delivered  to  them;  fatty  degeneration  of  the  heart,  or  of 
the  liver,  or  any  of  the  vital  organs.  You  may  cause  a  head- 
ache by  clogging  the  blood  stream  through  overeating,  or  you 
may  cause  it  by  eating  small  quantities  of  food,  if  those  foods 
are  unbalanced,  and  do  not  contain  the  mineral  elements 
necessary  to  the  making  of  normal  blood.  Whatever  the 
trouble  with  your  health,  it  is  my  judgment  that  in  two  cases 
out  of  three  you  will  find  it  dates  back  to  errors  in  diet.  I 
do  not  think  I  exaggerate  in  saying  that  a  knowledge  of  what 
to  eat  and  how  much  to  eat  is  two-thirds  of  the  knowledge 
of  how  to  keep  yourself  in  permanent  health. 


CHAPTER  XX 
ERRORS   IN    DIET 

(Discusses  the  different  kinds  of  foods,  and  the  part  they 
play  in  the  making  of  health  and  disease.) 

It  is  my  purpose  in  this  chapter  to  lay  down  a  few  general 
principles  to  aid  you  in  the  practical  problem  of  selecting 
the  best  diet  for  yourself.  But  it  must  be  made  clear  at  the 
outset  that  there  can  be  no  hard  and  fast  rule.  All  human 
bodies  are  more  or  less  alike,  but  on  the  other  hand  all  are 
more  or  less  different.  Modern  civilization  has  given  very 
few  bodies  the  chance  to  be  perfect;  nearly  all  have  some 
weakness,  some  abnormality,  and  need  some  special  modifi- 
cation in  diet  to  fit  their  particular  problem.  The  ideal  in 
each  case  would  be  a  complete  study  of  the  individual  system. 
Some  day,  no  doubt,  medical  science  will  analyze  the  digestive 
juices  and  the  gland  secretions  and  the  blood-stream  of  every 
htmian  being,  and  say,  you  need  a  certain  percentage  of  starch 
and  a  certain  percentage  of  protein ;  you  need  such  and  such 
proportion  of  phosphorus  and  iron ;  you  should  avoid  cer- 
tain acids — and  so  on.  But  at  present  we  are  devoting  our 
science  to  the  task  of  killing  and  maiming  other  people,  in- 
stead of  enabling  ourselves  to  live  in  health  and  happiness; 
so  it  is  that  most  of  those  who  read  this  book  will  be  too 
poor  to  command  the  advice  of  a  diet  specialist.  The  best 
you  can  do  is  to  get  a  few  general  ideas  and  try  them  out, 
watching  your  own  body  and  learning  its  peculiarities. 

Human  food  contains  three  elements:  proteins,  fats  and 
carbohydrates.  The  proteins  are  the  body-building  material, 
and  the  foods  which  are  rich  in  proteins  are  lean  meat,  the 
white  of  eggs,  milk  and  cheese,  nuts,  peas  and  beans.  A  cer- 
tain amount  of  this  kind  of  food  is  needed  by  the  body.  If 
it  is  missing,  the  body  will  gradually  waste  away.  If  too 
much  of  it  is  taken,  the  body  can  turn  it  into  energy-making 
material,  but  this  is  a  wasteful  process,  and  the  best  evidence 
appears  to  be  that  it  is  a  strain  upon  the  system.  Experi- 
ments conducted  by  Professor  Chittenden  of  Yale  have  proven 
conclusively  that  men  can  live  and  maintain  body  weight  upon 

123 


124  JMiND  AND  Body 

much  less  protein  food  than  previous  dietetic  standards  had 
indicated. 

The  fats  are  found  in  fat  meats  and  dairy  products,  and 
in  nuts,  olives,  and  vegetable  oils.  The  body  is  prepared  to 
digest  and  assimilate  a  certain  amount  of  fat,  no  one  knows 
how  much.  I  have  found  in  my  own  case  that  I  require  a 
great  deal  less  than  people  ordinarily  eat.  I  have  for  many 
years  maintained  good  health  upon  a  diet  containing  no  more 
fat  than  one  gets  with  lean  meat  once  or  twice  a  day.  I  never 
use  butter  or  olive  oil,  nor  any  fat  in  cooking.  My  reason 
for  this  is  that  fats  are  the  most  highly  concentrated  form  of 
food,  and  the  easiest  upon  which  to  overeat.  Excess  of  fat 
is  a  cause,  not  merely  of  obesity,  but  also  of  boils  and  pim- 
ples and  "pasty"  complexion,  and  other  signs  of  a  clogged 
blood-stream. 

The  third  variety  of  food  is  the  carbohydrates,  and  of 
these  there  are  two  kinds,  starches  and  sugars.  Starch  is  the 
white  material  of  the  grains  and  tubers;  the  principal  food 
element  of  bread  and  cereals,  rice,  potatoes,  bananas,  and 
many  prepared  substances  such  as  corn-starch,  tapioca,  farina 
and  macaroni.  Starchy  foods  compose  probably  half  the 
diet  of  the  average  human  being.  In  my  own  case,  they  com- 
pose about  one-sixth,  so  you  see  to  what  extent  my  beliefs 
differ  from  the  common.  Starch  is  not  really  necessary  in  the 
diet  at  all.  I  have  a  friend  who  is  subject  to  headaches,  and 
finds  relief  from  them  by  a  diet  of  meat,  salads,  and  fresh 
fruits  exclusively.  The  first  thing  that  excess  of  starch  or 
sugar  does  is  to  ferment  in  the  system,  and  cause  flatulence 
and  gas.  But  strange  as  it  may  seem,  if  the  excess  of  starch 
is  perfectly  digested  and  assimilated  into  the  system,  the  con- 
dition may  be  worse  yet,  because  you  may  have  a  great 
quantity  of  energy-producing  material,  without  the  necessary 
mineral  elements  which  the  body  requires  in  the  handling  of  it. 

If  you  cremate  a  human  body  and  study  the  ashes  chem- 
ically, you  find  a  score  or  more  of  mineral  salts.  You  find  these 
in  the  blood,  and  no  blood  is  normal  and  no  body  can  be  kept 
normal  which  does  not  contain  the  right  percentage  of  these 
elements.  It  is  not  merely  that  they  are  needed  to  build 
bones  and  teeth;  they  are  needed  at  every  instant  for  the 
chemistry  of  the  cells.  Every  time  you  move  a  muscle,  you 
fill  the  cells  of  that  muscle  with  a  certain  amount  of  waste 
matter.    You  may  prove  how  deadly  this  matter  is  by  bind- 


The  Book  of  the  Body  125 

ing  a  tight  cord  about  your  arm,  and  then  trying  to  use  the 
arm.  We  are  only  at  the  beginning  of  understanding  the 
subtle  chemistry  of  the  body;  but  this  much  we  know,  the 
cells  transform  the  waste  products,  and  they  are  thrown  out 
of  the  system  as  ammonia,  uric  acid,  etc. ;  and  for  this  proc- 
ess the  blood  must  have  a  continual  supply  of  many  mineral 
salts. 

So  vital  are  they,  and  so  fatal  to  health  is  their  absence, 
that  it  is  far  better  for  you  to  eat  nothing  at  all  than  to  eat 
improperly  balanced  foods,  or  foods  which  are  deficient  in  the 
organic  salts.  You  may  prove  this  to  yourself  by  a  simple 
experiment.  Put  two  chickens  in  separate  pens,  where  nobody 
can  feed  them  but  yourself.  Feed  one  of  them  on  water  and 
white  bread,  or  corn  starch,  or  sugar,  or  any  energy-making 
substance  which  contains  little  of  the  mineral  elements.  Feed 
the  other  chicken  on  plain  water.  You  will  find  that  the 
one  which  has  the  food  will  quickly  become  droopy  and  sickly ; 
its  feathers  will  fall  out,  it  will  have  what  in  human  beings 
would  be  known  as  headaches,  colds,  sore  throats,  decaying 
teeth  and  boils.  At  the  end  of  a  couple  of  weeks  it  will  be 
a  dead  chicken.  The  one  which  you  feed  on  water  alone  will 
not  be  a  happy  chicken,  neither  will  it  be  a  fat  chicken, 
but  it  will  be  a  live  chicken,  and  a  chicken  without  disease. 
I  am  going  later  on  to  discuss  the  subject  of  fasting.  For 
the  present  I  will  merely  say  that  a  chicken  which  has  nothing 
but  water  is  living  upon  its  own  flesh,  and  therefore  has  a 
meat  diet,  containing  the  mineral  elements  necessary  to  the 
elimination  of  the  fatigue  poisons. 

I  am  going  to  try  not  to  be  dogmatic  in  this  book,  and 
not  to  say  things  that  I  do  not  know,  I  confess  to  innumer- 
able uncertainties  about  the  subject  of  diet;  but  one  thing  I 
think  I  do  know,  and  that  is  that  human  beings  should  elim- 
inate absolutely  from  their  food  those  modern  artificial  prod- 
ucts, which  look  so  nice,  and  are  so  easy  to  handle,  and  are 
put  up  in  packages  with  pretty  labels,  and  have  been  in  some 
way  artificially  treated  to  remove  the  wastes  and  impurities — 
including  the  vital  mineral  salts.  Among  such  food  substances 
I  include  lard  and  its  imitations  made  from  cottonseed  oil, 
white  flour,  all  the  prepared  and  refined  cereals,  polished 
rice,  tapioca,  farina,  corn  starch,  and  granulated  and  powdered 
sugar.  Any  of  these  substances  will  kill  a  chicken  in  a  couple 
of  weeks,  and  the  only  reason  they  take  a  longer  time  to  kill 


126  Mind  and  Body 

you  is  because  you  mix  them  with  other  kinds  of  foods.  But 
to  the  extent  that  you  eat  them,  your  diet  is  deficient;  and 
do  not  console  yourself  with  the  idea  that  the  mineral  ele- 
ments will  be  made  up  from  other  foods,  because  you  don't 
know  that,  and  nobody  else  knows  it.  Nobody  knows  just 
how  much  of  any  particular  organic  salt  the  body  needs.  All 
we  know  is  that  the  primitive  races,  which  ate  natural  foods, 
enjoyed  vigorous  health,  while  the  American  people,  who 
consume  the  greatest  proportion  of  the  so-called  "refined" 
foods,  have  the  very  best  dentists  and  the  very  worst  teeth 
in  the  world. 

There  are  many  kinds  of  sugar,  found  in  the  sugar-cane 
and  the  beet,  and  in  all  fruits.  Sugar  may  also  be  made  from 
any  form  of  starch;  this  is  glucose,  which  is  put  up  in  cans 
and  sold  as  an  imitation  of  maple  syrup.  The  ordinary  gran- 
ulated and  powdered  sugar  is  made  by  taking  from  the  natu- 
ral syrup  every  trace  of  mineral  elements;  so  I  have  no  hesi- 
tation in  saying  that  the  ordinary  cane  sugar  and  beet  sugar 
of  our  breakfast  tables  and  our  confectionery  stores  is  not  a 
food,  but  a  slow  poison.  The  causes  of  the  wonderful  prog- 
ress of  American  dentistry,  which  is  the  marvel  of  the  civi- 
lized world,  are  cane  sugar,  white  flour,  and  the  frying-pan, 
each  of  which  dietetic  crimes  I  shall  take  up  in  turn. 

We  have  the  richest  country  in  the  world;  we  eat  more 
food,  probably  by  50  per  cent,  and  we  waste  more  food, 
probably  by  500  per  cent,  than  any  other  people  in  the  world ; 
and  yet,  go  to  any  small  farming  community  in  America,  and 
what  do  you  find?  You  find  the  teeth  of  the  young  children 
rotting  in  their  heads,  and  having  to  be  pulled  out  before 
their  second  teeth  come.  You  find  these  second  teeth  rot- 
ting often  before  the  age  of  twenty.  A  friend  of  mine, 
who  knows  the  American  farmer,  sums  it  up  this  way :  "He 
has  two  things  that  he  requires  if  he  is  to  be  really  respectable 
and  happy.  First,  he  wants  to  get  all  the  fireplaces  in  his 
home  boarded  up,  and  all  the  windows  nailed  tight ;  and  sec- 
ond, he  wants  to  get  all  his  teeth  out,  and  an  artificial  set 
installed.  Out  of  the  farmers*  wives  in  my  neighborhood,  not 
one  in  ten  keeps  her  own  teeth  until  she  is  thirty." 

If  you  go  to  the  Balkans,  where  the  peasants  live  on  sour 
milk,  with  grains  which  they  grind  at  home;  or  to  southern 
Italy  and  Sicily,  where  they  live  on  cheese  and  black  bread 
and  olives;  or  among  savage  people,  where  they  hunt  and 


The  Book  of  the  Body  127 

fish  and  gather  the  natural  fruits,  you  find  old  men  without  a 
single  decayed  tooth.  There  must  be  some  reason  for  this, 
and  the  reason  is  found  in  our  denatured  grocery-store  foods. 
The  farmer's  wife  will  gather  up  her  eggs  and  her  butter 
and  cheeses,  and  take  them  to  the  store  and  bring  back  cans 
of  lard  and  packages  of  sugar.  The  farmer  will  sell  his  per- 
fectly good  wheat  and  corn  meal,  and  bring  back  in  his  wagon 
cases  of  "refined"  cereal  foods,  for  which  he  has  paid  ten 
times  the  price  of  the  grain ! 

Dentists  will  tell  you  that  the  way  candy  injures  the  teeth 
is  by  sticking  to  them  and  fermenting,  forming  acids,  which 
destroy  the  tooth  structure.  And  that  may  be  a  part  of  the 
reason.  But  the  principal  reason  why  the  teeth  decay  is 
because  the  blood-stream  is  abnormal,  and  is  unable  to  keep  up 
the  repairs  of  the  body.  Your  teeth  are  living  structures, 
just  as  much  as  any  other  part  of  you,  and  they  will  resist 
decay  if  you  supply  them  with  the  proper  nourishment. 

You  need  sugar;  you  need  a  considerable  quantity  of  it 
every  day.  Nature  provides  this  sugar  in  combination  with 
the  organic  salts,  and  also  with  the  precious  vitamines,  whose 
function  in  the  body  we  are  only  beginning  to  investigate.  All 
the  mineral  substances  which  give  the  color  and  flavor  to 
oranges,  apples,  peaches,  grapes,  figs,  prunes,  raisins — all 
these  you  take  out  when  you  make  sugar.  Or  perhaps  you 
put  in  some  imitations  of  them,  made  from  coal  tar  chemicals, 
and  drink  them  at  your  soda  fountains!  So  little  apprecia- 
tion has  the  American  farmer's  wife  of  natural  fruits,  that 
when  she  preserves  them,  she  considers  it  necessary  to  fill 
them  full  of  cane  sugar;  in  fact,  she  has  a  notion  that  they 
won't  keep  unless  she  cooks  them  up  with  sugar!  So  snob- 
bish are  we  Americans  about  our  eating,  that  we  make  the 
best  of  our  foods  into  bywords.  We  make  jokes  in  our  comic 
papers  about  the  "boarding-house  prune" ;  and  yet  prunes  and 
raisins  are  among  the  wholesomest  foods  we  have,  and  if  we 
fed  them  to  our  children  instead  of  cakes  and  candy  and 
coal-tar  flavorings,  our  dental  industry  would  rapidly  decline. 

And  the  same  thing  is  true  of  bread.  When  I  was  a  boy, 
I  thought  I  had  to  have  hot  bread  at  least  twice  a  day,  and 
if  I  were  called  upon  to  eat  bread  that  was  more  than  a  day 
old,  I  felt  that  I  was  being  badly  abused  by  life.  I  used 
to  read  fairy  stories,  in  which  something  called  "black  bread" 
was  mentioned,  something  obscure  and  terrible ;  the  symbol  of 


128  Mind  and  Body 

human  misery  was  Cinderella  sitting  in  the  ashes  and  eating 
a  crust  of  dry  "black  bread."  But  now  since  I  have  studied 
diet,  I  have  taken  my  place  with  Cinderella.  I  can  afford  to 
buy  whatever  kind  of  bread  I  want ;  I  can  have  the  best  white 
bread,  piping  hot,  three  times  a  day,  if  I  want  it;  but  what 
I  eat  three  times  a  day  is  a  crust  of  hard  dry  "black  bread." 

"Black  bread"  is  the  fairy  story  name  for  bread  made  of 
the  whole  grain.  It  is  eaten  that  way  by  the  peasant  because 
he  has  no  patent  milling  machinery  at  his  disposal,  to  fan 
away  the  life-giving  elements  of  his  food.  Nearly  all  the 
mineral  elements  of  the  grain  are  contained  in  the  outer, 
dark-colored  portion.  The  white  part  is  almost  pure  starch; 
and  when  you  use  white  flour,  you  are  not  merely  starving 
your  blood-stream,  your  bones,  and  your  teeth,  you  are  also 
depriving  the  digestive  tract  of  the  rough  material  which  it 
is  accustomed  to  handle,  and  which  it  needs  to  stimulate  it 
to  action.  I  am  aware  that  whole  grain  products  are  a  trifle 
less  easy  of  digestion,  but  we  should  not  pamper  and  weaken 
our  digestive  tract  any  more  than  we  let  our  muscles  get 
flabby  for  lack  of  action.  We  should  require  our  stomachs 
to  handle  the  ordinary  natural  foods,  precisely  as  we  accustom 
our  body  to  react  from  cold  water,  and  to  stand  honest  hard 
work. 

For  ages  the  Japanese  peasants  have  lived  on  rice,  with 
a  little  dried  fish.  Quite  recently  there  began  to  spread  through- 
out Japan  a  mysterious  disease  known  as  beri-beri.  It  was 
especially  prevalent  in  the  army,  and  so  the  scientists  of  Japan 
set  out  to  discover  the  cause,  and  it  proved  to  be  the  modern 
practice  of  polishing  rice,  which  takes  off  the  outer  coating  of 
the  grain.  Rice  is  one  of  the  most  wholesome  of  foods,  if 
it  is  eaten  in  the  natural  state;  but  in  order  to  get  it  in  that 
state  in  this  country,  you  have  to  find  a  special  food  store  of 
the  health  cranks,  and  have  to  pay  a  special  price  for  it.  You 
have  to  pay  a  higher  price  for  whole  wheat  bread — because 
ninety-nine  people  out  of  a  hundred  are  ignorant,  and  insist 
upon  having  their  foodstuffs  pretty  to  look  at! 

Probably  you  have  read  sea  stories,  and  know  of  the  hor- 
rors of  scurvy.  Scurvy  and  beri-beri  are  similar  diseases, 
with  a  similar  cause.  The  men  on  the  old  sailing  ships  used 
to  have  to  live  on  white  biscuit  and  salt  meat,  and  they  always 
knew  that  to  recover  from  their  gnawing  illness,  they  must 
get  to  port  and  get  fresh  vegetables  and  fruits,  especially 


The  Book  of  the  Body  129 

onions  and  lemons,  which  contain  the  vitamines  as  well  as 
the  salts.  But  you  will  see  the  modern  housewife  going  into 
the  grocery  store,  and  surveying  the  shelves  of  "package" 
goods,  and  in  her  ignorance  picking  out  the  scurvy-making 
products,  and  frequently  paying  for  them  a  much  higher 
price  than  for  the  health-making  ones! 

Then,  when  she  has  got  her  white  flour,  and  her  cane 
sugar,  and  her  lard,  she  will  take  it  home,  and  mix  it  up,  and 
put  it  in  the  frying  pan,  and  serve  it  hot  to  her  husband  and 
children.  Nature  has  so  constituted  her  husband  and  chil- 
dren that  they  digest  starch  before  they  digest  fat;  that  is  to 
say,  the  starch  is  digested  mainly  in  the  stomach,  while  the 
fat  is  digested  mainly  after  the  food  has  been  passed  on  into 
the  small  intestine.  But  by  frying  the  starch  before  it  is  eaten, 
the  housewife  carefully  takes  each  grain  of  the  starch  and 
protects  it  with  a  little  covering  of  fat.  Thus  the  digestive 
juices  of  the  stomach  cannot  get  at  the  starch,  and  the  starch 
goes  down  into  the  small  intestine  a  good  part  undigested.  If 
some  evil  spirit,  wishing  to  make  trouble  for  the  human  or- 
ganism, had  charge  of  the  laying  out  of  our  diet,  he  could 
hardly  devise  anything  worse  than  that.  And  yet  it  would 
be  no  exaggeration  to  say  that  the  average  American,  espe- 
cially the  average  farmer,  eats  out  of  a  frying-pan.  If  his 
potatoes  have  to  be  warmed  over,  they  go  into  the  frying-pan ; 
his  precious  batter-cakes  and  doughnuts  are  cooked  in  a  fry- 
ing-pan, and  all  his  precious  hot  breads  are  mixed  with  lard. 
If  it  were  not  for  the  fact  that  you  cannot  broil  a  beefsteak 
over  a  modern  gas  range,  I  would  tell  you  that  the  first  step 
toward  health  for  the  average  American  would  be  to  throw 
the  frying-pan  out  of  the  window,  and  to  throw  the  cook- 
book after  it. 

The  whole  modern  art  of  cooking  is  largely  a  perversion; 
a  product  of  idleness,  vanity,  and  sensuality.  It  is  one  of 
the  monstrous  growths  consequent  upon  our  system  of  class 
exploitation.  We  have  a  number  of  idle  people  with  nothing 
to  do  but  eat,  and  who  demonstrate  their  superiority  to  the 
rest  of  us  by  their  knowledge  of  superior  foods,  and  superior 
ways  of  preparing  them.  They  have  the  wealth  of  the  world 
at  their  disposal,  also  the  services  of  their  fellow  man  with- 
out limit,  and  they  set  their  fellow  man  to  work  to  enable 
them  to  give  elaborate  banquets,  and  to  sit  in  solemn  state 
and  gorge  themselves,  and  to  have  a  full  account  of  their  be- 


130  Mind  and  Body 

havior  published  in  the  next  morning's  newspapers.  A  great 
part  of  this  perverse  art  we  owe  to  what  is  called  the  "ancient 
regime"  in  France — a  regime  which  starved  the  French  peas- 
antry until  they  were  black  skinned  beasts  hiding  in  caves 
and  hollow  trees.  So  it  comes  about  that  our  modern  food 
depravity  parades  itself  in  French  names,  and  American  snob- 
bery requires  of  its  devotees  a  course  in  the  French  language 
sufficient  to  read  a  menu  card.  Needless  to  say,  this  elaborate 
gastronomic  art  has  been  developed  without  any  relation  to 
health,  or  any  thought  of  the  true  needs  of  the  body.  It  is 
one  of  the  products  of  the  predatory  system  which  we  can 
say  is  absolute  waste.  Having  done  my  own  cooking  for  the 
past  twenty-five  years,  I  make  bold  to  say  that  I  can  teach 
anybody  all  he  needs  to  know  about  cooking  in  one  lesson  of 
half  an  hour,  and  that  the  total  amount  of  cooking  required 
for  a  large  family  can  be  done  by  one  person  in  twenty 
minutes  a  day. 

In  the  first  place,  a  great  many  foods  do  not  have  to  be 
cooked  at  all,  and  are  made  less  fit  by  cooking.  In  the  next 
place,  the  only  cooking  that  is  ever  required  is  a  little  boil- 
ing, or  in  the  case  of  meat,  roasting  or  broiling.  In  the  next 
place,  the  art  of  combining  foods  in  cooking  is  a  waste  art, 
because  no  foods  should  be  combined  in  cooking.  Every 
food  has  its  own  natural  flavor,  which  is  lost  in  combination, 
and  if  anybody  is  unable  to  enjoy  the  natural  flavors  of  sim- 
ply cooked  foods,  there  is  one  thing  to  say  to  that  person, 
and  that  is  to  wait  until  he  is  hungry.  Let  him  take  a  ten- 
mile  walk  in  the  open  air,  and  he  will  have  more  interest 
in  his  next  meal.  I  am  not  a  fanatic,  and  have  no  desire  to 
destroy  the  pleasures  of  life;  I  am  recommending  to  people 
that  they  should  seek  the  higher  pleasures  of  the  intellect, 
and  those  pleasures  are  not  found  in  standing  over  a  cook 
stove,  nor  in  compelling  others  to  stand  over  a  cook  stove. 
Moreover,  I  know  that  the  artificial  mixing  of  foods  to  tempt 
peoples'  palates  is  one  of  the  principal  causes  of  overeating, 
and  therefore  of  ill  health,  and  therefore  of  the  ultimate 
destruction  of  the  pleasures  of  life. 

I  went  out  from  the  world  of  cooks  before  I  was  twenty. 
I  wanted  to  write  a  book,  and  to  be  let  alone  while  I  was 
doing  it.  I  lived  by  myself,  and  found  out  about  cooking  by 
practical  experience.  On  a  few  occasions  since  then,  I  have 
lived  in  a  house  with  a  servant,  and  had  some  cooking  done 


The  Book  of  the  Body  131 

for  me,  but  it  was  always  because  somebody  else  wanted  it, 
and  against  my  protest.  In  the  last  ten  years  we  have  had 
no  servant  in  our  home,  and  because  I  want  my  wife  to  give 
her  energy  to  more  important  things  than  feeding  me,  I  do 
my  share  of  getting  every  meal.  We  have  worked  out  a 
system  of  housekeeping  by  which  we  get  a  meal  in  five  min- 
utes, and  when  we  finish  it,  it  takes  three  minutes  to  clear 
things  away. 

If  I  tell  you  what  I  eat,  please  do  not  get  the  impression 
that  I  am  advising  you  to  eat  these  same  things.  My  diet 
consists  of  the  foods  which  I  have  found  by  long  experience 
agree  with  me.  There  are  many  other  foods  which  are  just 
as  wholesome,  but  which  I  do  not  eat,  either  because  they 
don't  happen  to  agree  with  me,  or  because  I  don't  care  for 
them  so  much.  I  am  fond  of  fruit,  and  eat  more  of  that 
than  of  anything  else.  It  is  not  a  cheap  article  of  diet,  but 
you  can  save  a  good  deal  if  you  buy  it  in  quantities,  as  I  do. 
A  little  later  I  am  going  to  discuss  the  prices  of  foods. 

For  breakfast  I  eat  a  slice  of  whole  wheat  bread,  three 
good-sized  apples,  stewed,  and  eight  or  ten  dates.  It  takes 
practically  no  time  to  prepare  this  breakfast.  The  bread  has 
to  be  baked,  of  course,  but  this  is  done  wholesale;  we  buy 
four  loaves  at  a  time,  and  it  is  just  as  good  at  the  end  of 
a  couple  of  weeks  as  when  we  buy  it.  When  I  lived  in  the 
world  of  cooks,  I  would  call  for  apple  sauce;  which  meant 
that  somebody  had  to  pare  apples,  cut  them  up,  stew  them, 
mix  them  with  sugar,  grate  a  little  nutmeg  over  them,  set 
them  on  ice,  and  serve  them  to  me  on  a  glass  dish,  with  a 
little  pitcher  of  cream.  But  now  what  happens  is  that  I  put 
a  dozen  apples  in  a  big  sauce-pan  and  let  them  simmer  while 
I  am  eating.  We  have  a  rule  in  our  family  that  we  do 
not  do  any  cooking  except  while  we  are  eating,  because  if 
we  try  it  at  any  other  time  of  the  day,  we  get  buried  in  a 
book  or  in  a  manuscript,  and  forget  about  it  until  the  smoke 
causes  somebody  in  the  street  to  summon  the  fire  depart- 
ment. So  the  apples  for  my  breakfast  were  cooked  during 
last  night's  supper;  and  during  the  breakfast  there  will  be 
some  vegetable  cooking  for  lunch. 

At  this  lunch,  which  is  my  "square  meal,"  I  cat  a  large 
slice  of  beefsteak,  say  a  third  of  a  pound.  Jack  London 
used  to  say  that  the  only  man  who  could  cook  a  beefsteak 
was  the  fireman  of  a  railway  locomotive,  because  he  had  a  hot. 


132  Mind  and  Body 

clean  shovel.  The  best  imitation  you  can  get  is  a  hot,  clean 
frying-pan;  and  when  you  are  sure  that  it  is  hot,  let  it  get 
hotter.  The  whole  secret  of  cooking  meat  is  to  keep  the 
juices  inside,  and  to  do  that  you  must  cook  it  quickly.  When 
you  slap  it  down  on  a  hot  frying-pan,  the  meat  is  seared,  and 
the  juices  stay  inside,  and  if  you  do  not  turn  it  over  until  it 
is  almost  ready  to  burn,  you  don't  need  to  cook  it  very  long 
on  the  other  side.  That  is  the  one  secret  of  cooking  worth 
knowing;  it  doesn't  cost  anything,  and  saves  time  instead  of 
wasting  it.  As  I  have  never  found  anybody  else  capable  of 
learning  it,  I  reserve  the  cooking  of  the  beefsteak  as  one  of 
my  family  duties. 

To  continue  the  lunch,  a  slice  of  whole  wheat  bread,  and 
a  large  quantity  of  some  fresh  salad,  such  as  celery,  or  let- 
tuce and  tomatoes,  without  dressing.  For  a  part  of  this  may 
be  substituted  a  vegetable,  one  or  two  beets  or  turnips,  cooked 
during  a  previous  meal,  and  warmed  up  in  a  couple  of 
minutes;  and  we  do  not  throw  away  the  tops  of  the  turnips 
and  beets  and  celery,  we  put  them  on  and  cook  them,  and  they 
serve  for  the  next  day's  meal.  If  you  would  eat  a  large  quan- 
tity of  such  "greens"  once  a  day,  you  would  escape  many  of 
the  ills  that  your  flesh  is  at  present  heir  to.  Finally,  for 
dessert,  an  orange  and  a  small  handful  of  raisins,  or  one  or 
two  figs. 

The  evening  meal  will  be  the  same  as  the  breakfast ;  except 
once  in  a  while  when  I  am  especially  hungry,  and  want  some 
meat.  I  am  writing  in  the  winter  season,  so  the  fruits  sug- 
gested are  those  available  in  winter.  The  menu  will  be  varied 
with  every  kind  of  fruit  at  the  season  when  it  is  cheapest 
and  most  easily  obtained.  The  beefsteak  will  appear  at  about 
three  meals  out  of  four;  occasionally  it  will  be  replaced  by 
the  lean  meat  of  pork  or  mutton,  or  by  fish.  The  bread  may 
be  replaced  by  rice,  or  boiled  potatoes,  either  white  or  sweet, 
and  occasionally  by  graham  crackers.  I  know  that  these 
contain  a  little  fat  and  sugar,  but  I  try  not  to  be  fanatical 
about  my  diet,  and  the  rules  I  suggest  do  not  carry  the  death 
penalty.  There  was  a  time  when  I  used  to  allow  my  friends 
to  make  themselves  miserable  by  trying  to  provide  me  with 
special  foods  when  they  invited  me  to  a  meal,  but  now  I 
tell  them  to  "forget  it,"  and  I  politely  nibble  a  little  of  every- 
thing, and  eat  most  of  what  I  find  wholesome;  if  there  is 
nothing  wholesome,  I  content  myself  with  the  pretense  of  a 


The  Book  of  the  Body  133 

meal.  If  I  find  myself  in  a  restaurant,  I  quite  shamelessly 
get  a  piece  of  apple  or  pumpkin  pie,  omitting  most  of  the 
crust.  As  I  don't  go  away  from  home  ntore  than  once  or 
twice  a  month,  I  do  not  have  to  worry  about  such  indulgence. 
The  main  thing  is  to  arrange  one's  home  diet  on  sound  lines, 
and  learn  to  enjoy  the  simple  and  wholesome  foods,  of  which 
there  is  a  great  variety  obtainable,  and  at  prices  possible  to 
all  but  the  wretchedly  poor. 

In  conclusion,  since  everybody  likes  to  have  a  feast  now 
and  then,  I  specify  that  my  diet  regimen  allows  for  holidays. 
Assuming  that  I  am  your  guest  for  a  day,  and  that  you  wish 
to  "blow"  me,  regardless  of  expense,  here  will  be  the  menu. 
Breakfast,  some  graham  crackers,  a  bunch  of  raisins,  a  can  of 
sliced  pineapple  in  winter,  or  a  big  chunk  of  watermelon  in 
summer.  Dinner,  or  lunch,  roast  pork,  a  baked  apple,  a 
baked  sweet  potato  and  some  spinach.  Supper,  lettuce,  dates, 
and  a  dish  of  popcorn  flavored  with  peanut  butter.  Try  this 
next  Christmas! 

P.  S.  After  this  book  had  been  put  into  type,  I  chanced 
to  be  looking  over  Herbert  Quick's  illuminating  book,  "On 
Board  the  Good  Ship  Earth."  Discussing  the  importance  of 
certain  organic  salts  to  the  body.  Dr.  Quick  states:  "Animals 
have  been  fed,  as  an  experiment,  on  foods  deficient  in  phos- 
phorus. For  a  while  they  seemed  to  do  well.  Then  they 
collapsed.  It  takes  only  three  months  of  a  ration  without 
phosphorus  to  wreck  an  animal.  Individual  creatures  were 
killed  after  a  month  of  this  diet,  and  it  was  found  that  the 
flesh  was  taking  the  phosphate — for  the  phosphorus  exists  in 
the  body  in  that  form — from  the  bones  to  supply  its  need.  In 
other  words,  the  body  was  eating  its  own  bones!  When  this 
process  had  robbed  the  bones  to  the  limit,  the  collapse  came, 
and  the  animal  could  never  recover." 


CHAPTER  XXI 

DIET  STANDARDS 

(Discusses  various  foods  and  their  food  values,  the  quantities 
we  need,  and  their  money  cost.) 

I  think  there  is  no  more  important  single  question  about 
heahh  than  the  question  of  how  much  food  we  should  eat. 
It  is  one  about  which  there  is  a  great  deal  of  controversy,  even 
among  the  best  authorities.  We  shall  try  here  for  a  common- 
sense  solution.  At  the  outset  we  have  to  remind  ourselves 
of  the  distinction  we  tried  to  draw  between  nature  and  man. 
To  what  extent  can  civilized  man  rely  upon  his  instincts  to 
keep  him  in  perfect  health  ? 

Let  us  begin  by  considering  the  animals.  How  is  their 
diet  problem  solved?  Horses  and  cattle  in  a  wild  state  are 
adjusted  to  certain  foods  which  they  find  in  nature,  and  so 
long  as  they  can  find  it,  they  have  no  diet  problem.  Man 
comes,  and  takes  these  animals  and  domesticates  them;  he 
observes  their  habits,  and  gives  to  them  a  diet  closely  ap- 
proaching the  natural  one,  and  they  get  along  fairly  well.  But 
suppose  the  man,  with  his  superior  skill  in  agriculture,  taking 
wild  grain  and  planting  it,  reaping  and  threshing  it  by  machin- 
ery, puts  before  his  horse  an  unlimited  quantity  of  a  con- 
centrated food  such  as  oats,  which  the  horse  can  never  get 
in  a  natural  state — will  that  horse's  instincts  guide  it?  Not 
at  all.     Any  horse  will  kill  itself  by  overeating  on  grain. 

I  have  read  somewhere  a  clever  saying,  that  a  farm  is 
a  good  place  for  an  author  to  live,  provided  he  can  be  per- 
suaded not  to  farm  it.  But  once  upon  a  time  I  had  not 
heard  that  wise  remark,  and  I  owned  and  tried  to  run  a  farm. 
I  had  two  beautiful  cows  of  which  I  was  very  proud,  and  one 
morning  I  woke  up  and  discovered  that  the  cows  had  got 
into  the  pear  orchard  and  had  been  feeding  on  pears  all  night. 
In  a  few  hours  they  both  lay  with  bloated  stomachs,  dying. 
A  farmer  told  me  afterwards  that  I  might  have  saved  their 
lives,  if  I  had  stuck  a  knife  into  their  stomachs  to  let  out 
the  ga«.  I  do  not  know  whether  this  is  true  or  not.  But 
my  two  dead  cows  afford  a  perfect  illustration  of  the  reason 

134 


The  Book  of  the  Body  135 

why  civilized  man  cannot  rely  upon  his  instincts  and  his 
appetites  to  tell  him  when  he  has  had  enough  to  eat.  He  can 
only  do  this,  provided  he  rigidly  restricts  himself  to  the  foods 
which  he  ate  in  the  days  when  his  teeth  and  stomach  and 
bowels  were  being  shaped  by  the  process  of  natural  selection. 
If  he  is  going  to  eat  any  other  than  such  strictly  natural 
foods,  he  will  need  to  apply  his  reason  to  his  diet  schedule. 

In  a  state  of  nature  man  has  to  hunt  his  food,  and  the 
amount  that  he  finds  is  generally  limited,  and  requires  a  lot 
of  exercise  to  get.  Explorers  in  Africa  give  us  a  picture  of 
man's  life  in  the  savage  state,  guided  by  his  instincts  and  very 
little  interfered  with  by  reason.  The  savages  will  starve  for 
long  periods,  then  they  will  succeed  in  killing  a  hippopotamus 
or  a  buffalo,  and  they  will  gorge  themselves,  and  nearly  all 
of  them  will  be  ill,  and  several  of  them  will  die.  So  you  see, 
even  in  a  state  of  nature,  and  with  natural  foods,  restraint 
is  needed,  and  reason  and  moral  sense  have  a  part  to  play. 

What  do  reason  and  moral  sense  have  to  tell  us  about 
diet?  Our  bodily  processes  go  on  continuously,  and  we  need 
at  regular  intervals  a  certain  quantity  of  a  number  of  different 
foods.  The  most  elementary  experiment  will  convince  us  that 
we  can  get  along,  maintain  our  body  weight  and  our  work- 
ing efficiency  upon  a  much  smaller  quantity  of  food  than 
we  naturally  crave.  Civilized  custom  puts  before  us  a  great 
variety  of  delicate  and  appetizing  foods,  upon  which  we  are 
disposed  to  overeat;  and  we  are  slow  observers  indeed  if  we 
do  not  note  the  connection  between  this  overeating  and  ill 
health.  So  we  are  forced  to  the  conclusion  that  if  we  wish 
to  stay  well,  we  need  to  establish  a  censorship  over  our  habits ; 
we  need  a  different  diet  regimen  from  the  haphazard  one 
which  has  been  established  for  us  by  a  combination  of  our 
instincts  with  the  perversions  of  civilization. 

Up  to  a  few  years  ago,  it  was  commonly  taken  for  granted 
by  authorities  on  diet  that  what  the  average  man  actually 
eats  must  be  the  normal  thing  for  him  to  eat.  Governments 
which  were  employing  men  in  armies,  and  at  road  building, 
and  had  to  feed  them  and  keep  them  in  health,  made  large 
scale  observations  as  to  what  the  men  ate,  and  thus  were 
established  the  old  fashioned  "diet  standards."  They  are  ex- 
pressed in  calories,  which  is  a  heat  unit  representing  the 
quantity  of  fuel  required  to  heat  a  certain  small  quantity  of 
water  a  certain  number  of  degrees.     In  order  that  you  may 


136  Mind  and  Body 

know  what  I  am  talking  about,  I  will  give  a  rough  idea  of 
the  quantity  of  the  more  common  foods  which  it  takes  to 
make  100  calories:  one  medium  sized  slice  of  bread,  a  piece 
of  lean  cooked  steak  the  size  of  two  fingers,  one  large  apple, 
three  medium  tablespoonfuls  of  cooked  rice  or  potatoes,  one 
large  banana,  a  tablespoonful  of  raisins,  five  dates,  one  large 
fig,  a  teaspoonful  of  sugar,  a  ball  of  butter  the  size  of  your 
thumbnail,  a  very  large  head  of  lettuce,  three  medium  sized 
tomatoes,  two-thirds  of  a  glass  of  milk,  a  tablespoonful  of  oil. 
You  observe,  if  you  compare  these  various  items,  how  little 
guidance  concerning  food  is  given  by  its  bulk.  You  may  eat 
a  whole  head  of  lettuce,  weighing  nearly  a  pound,  and  get  no 
more  food  value  than  from  a  half  ounce  of  olive  oil  which 
you  pour  over  it.  You  may  eat  enough  lean  beefsteak  to 
cover  your  plate,  and  you  will  not  have  eaten  so  much  as  a 
generous  helping  of  butter.  A  big  bowl  of  strawberries  will 
not  count  half  so  much  as  the  cream  and  sugar  you  put  over 
them.  So  you  may  realize  that  when  you  eat  olive  oil,  butter, 
cream,  and  sugar,  you  are  in  the  same  danger  as  the  horse 
eating  oats,  or  as  my  two  cows  in  the  pear  orchard ;  and  if 
some  day  a  surgeon  has  to  come  and  stick  a  knife  into  you, 
it  may  be  for  the  same  reason. 

The  old-fashioned  diet  standards  are  as  follows :  Swedish 
laborers  at  hard  work,  over  4,700  calories ;  Russian  workmen 
at  moderate  work,  German  soldiers  in  active  service,  Italian 
laborers  at  moderate  work,  between  3,500  and  3,700  calories; 
English  weavers,  nearly  3,500  calories;  Austrian  farm  labor- 
ers, over  5,000  calories.  Some  twenty  years  ago  the  United 
States  government  made  observations  of  over  15,000  persons, 
and  established  the  following,  known  as  the  "Atwater  stand- 
ards" :  men  at  very  hard  muscular  work,  5,500  calories ;  men 
at  moderately  active  muscular  work,  3,400  calories;  men  at 
light  to  moderate  muscular  work,  3,050  calories;  men  at 
sedentary,  or  women  at  moderately  active  work,  2,700  calories. 

In  the  last  ten  or  Bfteen  years  there  has  arisen  a  new 
school  of  dietetic  experts,  headed  by  Professors  Chittenden 
and  Fisher  of  Yale  University.  Professor  Chittenden  has 
published  an  elaborate  book,  "The  Nutrition  of  Man,"  in  which 
he  tells  of  long-continued  experiment  upon  a  squad  of  soldiers 
and  a  group  of  athletes  at  Yale  University,  also  upon  average 
students  and  professors.  He  has  proved  conclusively  that  all 
these  various  groups  have  been  able  to  maintain  full  body 


The  Book  of  the  Body  137 

weight  and  full  working  efficiency  upon  less  than  half  the 
quantity  of  protein  food  hitherto  specified,  and  upon  any- 
where from  one-half  to  two-thirds  the  calory  value  set  forth 
in  the  former  standards. 

When  I  first  read  this  book,  I  set  to  work  to  try  its 
theories  upon  myself.  During  the  five  or  six  months  that  I 
lived  on  raw  food,  I  took  the  trouble  to  weigh  everything  that 
I  ate,  and  to  keep  a  record.  It  is,  of  course,  very  easy  to 
weigh  raw  foods  exactly,  and  I  found  that  I  lived  an  active 
life  and  kept  physical  health  upon  slightly  less  than  2,500 
calories  a  day.  I  have  set  this  as  my  standard,  and  have 
accustomed  myself  to  follow  it  instinctively,  and  without 
wasting  any  thought  upon  it.  Sometimes  I  fall  from  grace; 
for  I  still  crave  the  delightful  cakes  and  candies  and  ice 
cream  upon  which  I  was  brought  up.  I  always  pay  the  pen- 
alty, and  know  that  I  will  not  get  back  to  my  former  state 
of  health  until  I  skip  a  meal  or  two,  and  give  my  system  a 
chance  to  clean  house.  The  average  man  will  find  the  regi- 
men set  forth  in  this  book  austere  and  awe-inspiring;  I  do 
not  wish  to  pose  as  a  paragon  of  virtue,  so  perhaps  I  should 
quote  a  sarcastic  girl  cousin,  who  remarked  when  I  was  a  boy 
that  the  way  to  my  heart  was  with  a  bag  of  ginger-snaps.  I 
live  in  the  presence  of  candy  stores  and  never  think  of  their 
existence,  but  if  someone  brings  candy  into  the  house  and 
puts  it  in  front  of  me,  I  have  to  waste  a  lot  of  moral  energy 
in  letting  it  alone.  A  few  years  ago  I  had  a  young  man  as 
secretary  who  discovered  this  failing  of  mine,  and  used  to 
afford  himself  immense  glee  by  buying  a  box  of  chocolates 
and  leaving  it  on  top  of  my  desk.  I  would  give  him  back  the 
box — with  some  of  the  chocolates  missing — but  he  would  per- 
sist in  "forgetting  it"  on  my  desk;  he  would  hide  and  laugh 
hilariously  behind  the  door,  until  my  wife  discovered  his 
nefarious  doings,  and  warned  me  of  them. 

Professor  Chittenden  states  quite  simply  the  common  sense 
procedure  in  the  matter  of  food  quantity.  Find  out  by  prac- 
tical experiment  what  is  the  very  least  food  upon  which  you 
can  do  your  work  without  losing  weight.  That  is  the  correct 
quantity  for  you,  and  if  you  are  eating  more,  you  certainly 
cannot  be  doing  your  body  any  good,  and  all  the  evidence 
indicates  that  you  are  doing  it  harm.  You  need  not  have 
the  least  fear  in  making  this  experiment  that  you  will  starve 
yourself.    Later  on,  in  a  chapter  on  fasting,  I  shall  prove  to 


138  Mind  and  Body 

you  that  you  carry  around  with  you  in  your  body  sufficient 
reserve  of  food  to  keep  you  alive  for  eighty  or  ninety  days; 
and  if  you  draw  on  a  small  quantity  of  this  you  do  not  do 
yourself  the  slightest  harm.  Cut  down  the  amount  of  your 
food;  eat  the  bulky  foods,  which  contain  less  calory  value, 
and  weigh  yourself  every  day,  and  you  will  be  surprised  to 
discover  how  much  less  you  need  to  eat  than  you  have  been 
accustomed  to. 

One  of  the  things  you  will  find  out  is  that  your  stomach 
is  easily  fooled;  it  is  largely  guided  by  bulk.  If  you  eat  a 
meal  consisting  of  a  moderate  quantity  of  lean  meat,  a  very 
little  bread,  a  heaping  dish  of  turnip  greens,  and  a  big  slice 
of  watermelon,  you  will  feel  fully  satisfied,  yet  you  will  not 
have  taken  in  one-third  the  calory  value  that  you  would  at  an 
ordinary  meal  with  gravies  and  dressings  and  dessert.  The 
bulky  kind  of  food  is  that  for  which  your  system  was  adapted 
in  the  days  when  it  was  shaped  by  nature.  You  have  a  large 
stomach,  many  times  as  large  as  you  would  have  had  if  you 
had  lived  on  refined  and  concentrated  foods  such  as  butter, 
sugar,  olive  oil,  cheese  and  eggs.  You  have  a  long  intestinal 
tract,  adapted  to  slowly  digesting  foods,  and  to  the  work  of 
extracting  nutrition  from  a  mass  of  roughage.  You  have  a 
very  large  lower  bowel,  which  MetchnikoflF,  the  Russian 
scientist,  one  of  the  greatest  minds  who  ever  examined  the 
problems  of  health,  declares  a  survival,  the  relic  of  a  previous 
stage  of  evolution,  and  a  source  of  much  disease.  The  best 
thing  you  can  do  with  that  lower  bowel  is  to  give  it  lots  of 
hay,  as  it  requires ;  in  other  words,  to  eat  the  salads  and  greens 
which  contain  cellulose  material.  This  contains  no  food  value, 
and  does  not  ferment,  but  fills  the  lower  bowel  and  stimulates 
it  to  activity. 

If  you  eat  too  much  food,  three  things  may  happen.  First, 
it  may  not  be  digested,  and  in  that  case  it  will  fill  your  sys- 
tem with  poisons.  Second,  it  may  be  assimilated,  but  not 
burned  up  by  the  body.  In  that  case  it  has  to  be  thrown  out 
by  the  kidneys  or  the  sweat  glands,  and  this  puts  upon  these 
organs  an  extra  strain,  to  which  in  the  long  run  they  may 
be  unequal.  Or  third,  the  surplus  material  may  be  stored  up 
as  fat.  This  is  an  old-time  trick  which  nature  invented  to 
tide  you  over  the  times  when  food  was  scarce.  If  you  were 
a  bear,  you  would  naturally  want  to  eat  all  you  could,  and  be 
as  fat  as  possible  in  November,  so  that  you  might  be  able 


The  Book  of  the  Body  139 

to  hunt  your  prey  when  you  came  out  from  your  winter's 
sleep  in  April.  But  you  are  not  a  bear,  and  you  expect  to 
eat  your  regular  meals  all  winter;  you  have  established  a 
system  of  civilization  which  makes  you  certain  of  your  food, 
and  the  place  where  you  keep  your  surplus  is  in  the  bank,  or 
sewed  up  in  the  mattress,  or  hidden  in  your  stocking.  In 
other  words,  a  civilized  man  saves  money,  and  the  habit  of 
storing  globules  of  grease  in  the  cells  of  his  body  is  a  sur- 
vival of  an  old  instinct,  and  a  needless  strain  upon  his  health. 
Not  merely  does  the  fat  man  have  to  carry  all  the  extra 
weight  around  with  him,  but  his  body  has  to  keep  it  and  tend 
it;  and  what  are  the  effects  of  this  is  fully  shown  by  life 
insurance  tables.  People  who  are  five  or  ten  per  cent  over 
weight  have  five  or  ten  per  cent  more  chance  of  dying  all 
the  time,  while  people  who  are  five  or  ten  per  cent  under 
weight  have  five  or  ten  per  cent  more  than  the  average  of 
life  expectation.  There  is  no  answer  to  these  figures,  which 
are  the  result  of  the  tabulation  of  many  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands of  cases.  The  meaning  of  them  to  the  fat  person  is  to 
put  himself  on  a  diet  of  lean  meat,  green  vegetables  and 
fresh  fruits,  until  he  has  brought  himself  down,  not  merely 
to  the  normal  fatness  of  the  civilized  man,  but  to  the  normal 
leanness  of  the  athlete,  the  soldier  on  campaign,  and  the 
student  who  has  more  important  things  to  think  about  than 
stuffing  his  stomach. 

There  is,  of  course,  a  certain  kind  of  leanness  which  is 
the  result  of  ill  health.  There  are  wasting  diseases;  tuber- 
culosis, for  example,  and  anemia.  There  are  people  who 
worry  themselves  thin,  and  there  are  a  few  rare  "spiritual" 
people,  so-called,  who  fade  away  from  lack  of  sufficient  in- 
terest in  their  bodies.  That  is  not  the  kind  of  leanness  that 
I  mean,  but  the  active,  wiry  leanness,  which  sometimes  lives 
a  hundred  years.  Nearly  always  you  will  find  that  such  people 
are  spare  eaters;  and  you  will  find  that  our  ideal  of  rosy 
plumpness,  both  for  adults  and  children,  is  a  wholly  false 
notion.  We  once  had  in  our  home  as  servant  an  Irish  girl, 
who  was  what  is  popularly  called  "a  picture  of  health,"  with 
those  beautiful  flaming  cheeks  that  Irish  and  English  women 
so  often  have.  She  was  in  her  early  twenties,  and  nobody 
who  knew  her  had  any  idea  but  that  her  health  was  perfect. 
But  one  morning  she  was  discovered  in  bed  with  one  side 
paralyzed,  and  in  a  couple  of  weeks  she  was  dead  with  ery- 


140  Mind  and  Body 

sipelas.  The  color  in  her  cheeks  had  been  nothing  but  dis- 
eased blood  vessels,  overloaded  with  food  material ;  and  with 
the  blood  in  that  condition,  one  of  the  tiny  vessels  in  the  brain 
had  become  clogged. 

In  the  same  way  I  have  seen  children,  two  or  three  years 
old,  plump  and  rosy,  and  considered  to  be  everything  that 
children  should  be;  but  pneumonia  would  hit  them,  and  in 
two  or  three  days  they  would  be  at  death's  door.  I  do  not 
mean  that  children  should  be  kept  hungry;  on  the  contrary, 
they  should  have  four  or  five  meals  a  day,  so  that  they  do 
not  have  a  chance  to  become  too  hungry.  But  at  those  meals 
they  should  eat  in  great  part  the  bulky  foods,  which  contain 
the  natural  salts  needed  for  building  the  body.  If  a  child 
asks  for  food,  you  may  give  it  an  apple,  or  you  may  give  it 
a  slice  of  bread  and  butter  with  sugar  on  it.  The  child  will 
be  equally  well  content  in  either  case ;  but  it  is  for  you,  with 
your  knowledge  of  food  values,  to  realize  that  the  bread  with 
butter  and  sugar  contains  two  or  three  times  as  much  nutri- 
ment as  the  apple,  but  contains  practically  none  of  the  pre- 
cious organic  salts  which  will  make  the  child's  bones  and 
teeth. 

So  far  I  have  discussed  this  subject  as  if  all  foods  grew 
on  bushes  outside  your  kitchen  door,  and  all  you  had  to  do 
was  to  go  and  pick  off  what  you  wanted.  But  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  foods  cost  money,  and  under  our  present  system  of 
wage  slavery,  the  amount  of  money  the  average  person  can 
spend  for  food  is  strictly  limited.  In  a  later  book  I  am  going  to 
discuss  the  problem  of  poverty,  its  causes  and  remedies.  All 
that  I  can  do  here  is  to  tell  you  what  foods  you  ought  to 
have,  and  if  society  does  not  pay  you  enough  for  your  work 
to  enable  you  to  buy  such  foods,  you  may  know  that  society 
is  starving  you,  and  you  may  get  busy  to  demand  your  rights 
as  human  beings.  Meantime,  however,  such  money  as  you 
do  have,  you  want  to  spend  wisely,  and  the  vast  majority  of 
you  spend  it  very  unwisely  indeed. 

In  the  first  place,  a  great  many  of  the  simplest  and  most 
wholesome  foods  are  cheap — often  because  people  do  not  know- 
enough  to  value  them.  We  insist  upon  having  the  choice 
cuts  of  meats,  because  they  are  more  tender  to  the  teeth, 
but  the  cheaper  cuts  are  exactly  as  nutritious.  We  insist  upon 
having  our  meats  loaded  with  fat,  although  fatness  is  an 
abnormal  condition  in  an  animal,  and  excess  of     fat  is  a 


The  Book  of  the  Body  141 

grave  error  in  diet.  I  live  in  a  country  where  jack  rabbits 
are  a  pest,  and  in  the  market  they  sell  for  perhaps  one- 
fourth  the  cost  of  beef,  and  yet  I  can  hardly  ever  get  them, 
because  people  value  them  so  little  as  food;  they  prefer  the 
meat  of  a  hog  which  has  been  wallowing  in  a  filthy  pen,  and 
has  been  deliberately  made  so  fat  that  it  could  hardly  walk! 

I  have  already  spoken  of  prunes,  a  much  despised  and 
invaluable  food.  All  the  dried  fruits  are  rich  in  food  values, 
and  if  we  could  get  them  untreated  by  chemicals,  they  would 
be  worth  their  cost.  I  was  brought  up  to  despise  the  cheaper 
vegetables,  such  as  cabbage  and  turnips ;  I  never  tasted  boiled 
cabbage  until  I  was  forty,  and  then  to  my  great  surprise 
I  made  the  discovery  that  it  is  good.  Raw  cabbage  is  as 
valuable  as  any  other  salad;  it  is  a  trifle  harder  to  digest 
for  some  people,  but  I  do  not  believe  in  pampering  the 
stomach.  Both  potatoes  and  rice  are  cheap  and  wholesome, 
if  only  we  would  get  unpolished  rice,  and  if  we  would 
leave  the  skins  on  the  potatoes  until  after  they  are  cooked. 
Nearly  all  the  mineral  salts  of  the  potato  are  just  under  the 
outer  skin,  and  are  removed  by  the  foolish  habit  of  peeling 
them. 

The  prices  of  food  differ  so  widely  at  different  seasons 
and  in  different  parts  of  the  world,  that  there  is  not  much 
profit  in  trying  to  figure  how  cheaply  a  person  can  live.  I 
have  found  that  I  spend  for  the  diet  I  have  indicated  here, 
from  sixty  to  eighty  cents  a  day.  I  do  not  buy  any  fancy 
foods,  but  on  the  other  hand,  I  do  not  especially  try  to 
economize ;  I  buy  what  I  want  of  the  simple  everyday  foods 
in  their  season.  Most  everyone  will  find  that  it  is  a  good 
business  proposition  to  buy  the  foods  which  he  needs  to  keep 
in  health.  If  the  average  workingman  would  add  up  the  money 
he  spends,  not  merely  in  the  restaurants,  but  in  the  candy 
stores,  the  drug  stores,  the  tobacco  stores,  and  the  offices 
of  doctors  and  dentists,  he  would  find,  I  think,  that  he  could 
afford  to  buy  himself  the  necessary  quantity  of  wholesome 
natural  foods.  For  a  family  of  three,  in  the  place  where  I 
live,  enough  of  these  foods  can  be  purchased  for  a  dollar 
a  day,  and  this  is  about  one-fourth  what  common  labor  is 
being  paid,  and  one-eighth  of  what  skilled  labor  is  being  paid. 
I  will  specify  the  foods:  a  pound  and  a  half  of  shoulder 
steak,  a  loaf  of  whole  wheat  bread  or  a  box  of  shredded 
wheat  biscuit,  a  head  of  cabbage,  a  pound  of  prunes,  and 
four  or  five  pounds  of  apples. 


1^  Mind  and  Body 

There  are  many  ways  of  saving  in  the  purchase  of  food 
if  you  put  your  mind  upon  it.  If  you  are  buying  prunes, 
you  may  pay  as  high  as  fifty  cents  or  a  dollar  a  pound  for  the 
big  ones,  and  they  are  not  a  bit  better  than  the  tiny  ones, 
which  you  can  buy  for  as  low  as  eight  cents  a  pound  in  bulk. 
When  bread  is  stale,  the  bakers  sell  it  for  half  price,  despite 
the  fact  that  only  then  has  it  become  fit  to  eat.  If  you  buy 
canned  peaches,  you  will  pay  a  fancy  price  for  them,  and 
they  will  be  heavy  with  cane  sugar;  but  if  you  inquire,  you 
find  what  are  known  as  "pie  peaches,"  put  up  in  gallon  tins 
without  sugar,  and  at  about  half  the  price.  The  butcher 
will  sell  you  what  he  calls  "hamburg  steak"  at  a  very  low 
price,  and  if  you  let  him  prepare  it  out  of  your  sight,  he  will 
fill  it  with  fat  and  gristle;  but  let  him  make  some  while  you 
watch,  and  then  you  have  a  very  good  food.  One  of  my 
diet  rules  is  that  I  do  not  trust  the  capitalist  system  to  fix 
me  up  any  kind  of  mixed  or  ground  or  prepared  foods.  I 
have  not  eaten  sausage  since  I  saw  it  made  in  Chicago. 

Also  there  is  something  to  know  about  the  cooking  of 
foods,  since  it  is  possible  to  take  perfectly  good  foods  and 
spoil  them  by  bad  cooking.  Once  upon  a  time  our  family 
discovered  a  fireless  cooker,  and  thought  that  was  a  wonder- 
ful invention  for  an  absent-minded  author  and  a  wife  who 
is  given  to  revising  manuscripts.  But  recent  investigations 
which  have  been  made  into  the  nature  of  the  "vitamines," 
food  ferments  which  are  only  partly  understood,  suggest  that 
prolonged  cooking  of  food  may  be  a  great  mistake.  The 
starch  has  to  be  cooked  in  order  to  break  the  cell  walls  by  the 
expansion  of  the  material  inside.  Twenty  minutes  will  be 
enough  in  the  case  of  everything  except  beans,  which  need 
to  be  cooked  four  or  five  hours.  Meat  should  be  eaten  rare, 
except  in  the  case  of  pork,  which  harbors  a  parasite  danger- 
ous to  the  human  body;  therefore  pork  should  always  be 
thoroughly  cooked.  The  white  of  eggs  is  made  less  digestible 
by  boiling  hard  or  frying.  Eggs  should  never  be  allowed  to 
boil ;  put  them  on  in  cold  water,  and  take  them  off  as  soon 
as  the  water  begins  to  boil.  It  is  not  necessary  to  cook  either 
fresh  fruit  or  dried.  The  dried  fruits  may  be  soaked  and 
eaten  raw,  but  I  find  that  several  fruits,  especially  apples  and 
pears,  do  not  agree  with  me  well  if  they  are  eaten  raw,  so 
I  stew  them  for  fifteen  or  twenty  minutes.  I  have  no  ob- 
tection  to  canned  fruits  and  vegetables,  provided  one  takes 


The  Book  or  the  Body  143 

the  trouble  in  opening  them  to  make  sure  there  is  no  sign  of 
spoiling.  If  you  put  up  your  own  fruits,  do  not  put  in  any 
sugar.  All  you  have  to  do  is  to  let  them  boil  for  a  few 
minutes,  and  to  seal  them  tightly  while  they  are  boiling  hot. 
The  whole  secret  of  preserving  is  to  exclude  the  air  with  its 
bacteria. 

If  you  live  on  a  farm,  you  will  have  no  trouble  in  fol- 
lowing the  diet  here  outlined,  for  you  can  produce  for  your- 
selves all  the  foods  that  I  have  recommended;  only  do  not 
make  the  mistake  of  shipping  out  your  best  foods,  and  taking 
back  the  products  of  a  factory,  just  because  you  have  read 
lying  advertisements  about  them.  Take  your  own  wheat  and 
oats  and  com  to  the  mill,  and  have  it  ground  whole,  and  make 
your  own  breads  and  cereals.  Try  the  experiment  of  mix- 
ing whole  com  meal  with  water  and  a  little  salt,  and  baking 
it  into  hard,  crisp  "corn  dodgers."  I  do  not  eat  these — but 
only  because  I  cannot  buy  them,  and  have  no  time  to  make 
them. 

Another  common  article  of  food  which  I  do  not  recom- 
mend is  salted  and  smoked  meats.  I  do  not  pretend  to  know 
the  effects  of  large  quantities  of  salt  and  saltpetre  and  wood 
smoke  upon  the  human  system,  but  I  know  that  Dr.  Wiley's 
"poison  squad"  proved  definitely  that  a  number  of  these  in- 
organic minerals  are  injurious  to  health,  and  I  prefer  to  take 
fresh  meat  when  I  can  get  it.  I  use  a  moderate  quantity  of 
common  salt  on  meat  and  potatoes,  because  there  seems  to 
be  a  natural  craving  for  this.  I  know  that  many  health  en- 
thusiasts insist  that  I  am  thus  putting  a  strain  on  my  kidneys, 
but  I  will  wait  until  these  health  enthusiasts  make  clear  to 
me  why  deer  and  cattle  and  horses  in  a  wild  state  will  travel 
many  miles  to  a  salt-lick.  I  have  learned  that  it  is  easy  to 
make  plausible  statements  about  health,  but  not  so  easy  to 
prove  them.  For  example,  I  was  told  that  it  is  injurious 
to  drink  water  at  meals,  and  for  years  I  religiously  avoided 
the  habit;  but  it  occurred  to  some  college  professor  to  find 
out  if  this  was  really  true,  and  he  carried  on  a  series  of 
experiments  which  proved  that  the  stomach  works  better 
■when  its  contents  are  diluted.  The  only  point  about  drink- 
ing at  meals  is  that  you  should  not  use  the  liquid  to  wash 
down  your  food  without  chewing  it. 

I  can  suggest  two  other  ways  by  which  you  may  save 
money  on  food.    One  is  by  not  eating  too  much,  and  another 


144  Mind  and  Body 

is  by  eating  all  that  you  buy.  The  amount  of  food  that  is 
wasted  by  the  people  of  America  would  feed  the  people  of 
any  European  nation.  The  amount  of  food  that  is  thrown 
out  from  any  one  of  our  big  American  leisure  class  hotels 
would  feed  the  children  of  a  European  town.  I  think  it  may 
fairly  be  described  as  a  crime  to  throw  into  the  garbage  pail 
food  which  might  nourish  human  life.  In  our  family  we 
have  no  garbage  pail.  What  little  waste  there  is,  we  burn 
in  the  stove,  and  my  wife  turns  it  into  roses.  It  consists  of 
the  fat  which  we  cannot  help  getting  at  the  butcher's,  and 
the  bones  of  meat,  and  the  skins  of  some  fruits  and  vege- 
tables. It  would  never  enter  into  our  minds  to  throw  out  a 
particle  of  bread,  or  meat,  or  other  wholesome  food.  If  we 
have  something  that  we  fear  may  spoil,  we  do  not  throw  it 
out,  but  put  it  into  a  saucepan  and  cook  it  for  a  few  minutes. 
If  you  will  make  the  same  rule  in  your  home,  you  will  stop 
at  least  that  much  of  the  waste  of  American  life ;  and  as  to 
the  big  leisure  class  hotels,  and  the  banquet  tables  of  the 
rich — just  wait  a  few  years,  and  I  think  the  social  revolu- 
tion will  attend  to  them ! 


CHAPTER  XXII 

FOODS  AND  POISONS 

(Concludes  the  subject  of  diet,  and  discusses  the  effect  upon 
the  system  of  stimulants  and  narcotics.) 

A  few  years  ago  there  died  an  old  gentleman  who  had 
devoted  some  twenty  years  of  his  life  to  teaching  people 
to  chew  their  food.  Horace  Fletcher  was  his  name,  and  his 
ideas  became  a  fad,  and  some  people  carried  them  to  comical 
extremes.  But  Fletcher  made  a  real  discovery ;  what  he  called 
"the  food  filter."  This  is  the  automatic  action  of  the  swal- 
lowing apparatus,  whereby  nature  selects  the  food  which 
has  been  sufficiently  prepared  for  digestion.  If  you  chew  a 
mouthful  of  food  without  ever  performing  the  act  of  swal- 
lowing, you  will  find  that  the  food  gradually  disappears. 
What  happens  is  that  all  of  it  which  has  been  reduced  to  a 
thin  paste  will  slip  unnoticed  down  your  throat,  and  you  may 
go  on  putting  more  food  into  your  mouth,  and  chewing,  and 
can  eat  a  whole  meal  without  ever  performing  the  act  of 
swallowing.  Fletcher  claimed  that  this  is  the  proper  way  to 
eat,  and  that  you  can  train  yourself  to  follow  this  method. 
I  have  tried  his  idea  and  adopted  it.  One  of  my  diet  rules, 
to  which  there  is  no  exception,  is  that  if  I  haven't  the  time 
to  chew  my  food  properly,  I  haven't  the  time  to  eat;  I  skip 
that  meal. 

The  habit  of  bolting  food  is  a  source  of  disease.  To  be 
sure,  the  carnivorous  animals  bolt  their  food,  but  they  are 
tougher  than  we  are,  and  do  not  carry  the  burden  of  a 
large  brain  and  a  complex  nervous  system.  If  you  swallow 
your  meals  half  chewed,  and  wash  them  down  with  liquids, 
you  may  get  away  with  it  for  a  while,  but  some  day  you  will 
pay  for  it  with  dyspepsia  and  nervous  troubles.  And  the 
same  thing  applies  to  your  habit  of  jumping  up  from  meals 
and  rushing  away  to  work,  whether  it  be  work  of  the  muscles, 
or  of  brain  and  nerves.  Proper  digestion  requires  the  pres- 
ence of  a  quantity  of  blood  in  the  walls  of  the  stomach  and 
digestive  tract.  It  requires  the  attention  of  your  subcon- 
scious mind,  and  this  means  rest  of  muscles  and  brain  centers. 

145 


3f^€  Mind  and  Body 

If  you  cannot  rest  for  an  hour  after  meals,  omit  that  meal, 
or  make  it  a  light  one,  of  fruit  juices,  which  are  almost  im- 
mediately absorbed  by  the  stomach,  and  of  salads,  which  do 
not  ferment.  You  may  rest  assured  that  it  will  not  hurt  you 
to  skip  a  meal,  and  make  up  for  it  when  you  have  time  to 
be  quiet.  I  have  been  many  times  in  my  life  under  very 
intense  and  long  continued  nervous  strain;  for  example,  dur- 
ing the  Colorado  coal  strike,  I  led  a  public  demonstration 
which  kept  me  in  a  state  of  excitement  all  the  day  and  a 
good  part  of  the  night  several  weeks.  During  this  period 
I  ate  almost  nothing;  a  baked  apple  and  a  cup  of  custard 
would  be  as  near  as  I  would  go  to  a  meal,  and  as  a  result 
I  came  through  the  experience  without  any  injury  whatever 
to  my  health.  I  lost  perhaps  ten  pounds  in  weight,  but  that 
was  quickly  made  up  when  I  settled  back  to  a  normal  way 
of  Hfe. 

I  have  been  on  camping  trips  when  I  had  a  great  deal 
of  hard  work  to  do,  carrying  a  canoe  long  distances  on  my 
back,  or  paddling  it  forty  miles  a  day.  On  the  mornings 
of  such  a  trip  I  have  seen  a  guide  cook  himself  an  elaborate 
breakfast  of  freshly  baked  bread,  bacon,  and  even  beans, 
and  make  a  hearty  meal  and  then  go  straight  to  work.  My 
meal,  on  the  contrary,  would  consist  of  a  small  dish  of  stewed 
prunes,  or  perhaps  some  huckleberries  or  raspberries,  if  they 
could  be  found.  I  will  not  say  that  I  could  do  as  much  as 
the  guide,  because  he  was  used  to  it,  and  I  was  not.  But  I 
can  say  this — if  I  had  eaten  his  breakfast  at  the  start  of 
the  day,  I  would  have  been  dead  before  night ;  and  I  mean  the 
word  "dead**  quite  literally.  I  know  a  man  who  started  to 
climb  Whitefacc  mountain  in  the  Adirondacks.  He  climbed 
half  way,  and  then  ate  lunch,  which  consisted  of  nine  hard 
boiled  eggs.  Then  he  started  to  climb  the  rest  of  the  moun- 
tain, and  dropped  dead  of  acute  indigestion. 

There  are  few  poisons  which  can  affect  the  system  more 
quickly,  or  more  dangerously,  than  a  mass  of  food  which  is 
not  digested.  The  stomach  is  an  ideal  forcing-house  for 
the  breeding  of  bacteria.  It  provides  warmth  and  moisture, 
and  you,  in  your  meal,  provide  the  bacteria  and  the  material 
upon  which  they  thrive.  Under  normal  conditions,  the  stom- 
ach pours  out  a  gastric  juice  which  kills  the  bacteria ;  but  let 
this  gastric  juice  for  any  reason  be  lacking — ^because  your 
nervous  energy  has  gone  somewhere  else,  or  because  your 


The  Book  of  the  Body  147 

blood-stream,  from  which  the  gastric  juice  must  be  made, 
has  been  drawn  away  to  the  muscles  by  hard  labor;  then  you 
have  a  yeast-pot,  with  great  quantities  of  gases  and  poisons. 
In  acute  cases  the  results  are  evident  enough :  violent  pains 
and  convulsions,  followed  by  coma  and  the  turning  black  of 
the  body.  But  what  you  should  understand  is  that  you  may 
produce  a  milder  case  of  such  poisoning,  and  may  do  it  day 
after  day  habitually,  and  little  by  little  your  vital  organs 
will  be  weakened  by  the  strain. 

It  does  not  make  any  difference  at  what  hour  of  the 
twenty-four  you  take  the  great  bulk  of  your  food.  It  is 
one  of  the  commonest  delusions  that  you  get  some  strength- 
ening effect  from  your  food  immediately,  and  must  have  this 
strength  in  order  to  do  hard  work.  To  be  sure,  there  are 
substances,  such  as  grape-sugar,  which  require  practically  no 
digesting;  you  can  hold  them  in  the  mouth,  and  they  will  be 
digested  by  the  saliva,  and  absorbed  at  once  into  the  blood- 
stream. But  unless  you  have  been  starved  for  a  long  period 
you  do  not  need  to  get  your  strength  in  this  rush  fashion. 
If  you  ate  your  normal  meals  on  the  previous  day,  your 
blood-stream  is  fully  supplied  with  nutriment  which  has  been 
put  through  a  long  process  of  preparation,  and  you  can  get 
up  in  the  morning  and  work  all  day,  if  necessary,  upon  what 
is  already  in  your  system.  To  be  sure,  you  may  feel  hungry, 
and  even  faint,  but  that  is  merely  a  matter  of  habit ;  your 
system  is  accustomed  to  taking  food  and  expects  it.  But  if 
you  are  a  laborer  doing  hard  work,  you  can  easily  train  your- 
self to  eat  a  light  meal  in  the  morning,  and  another  light 
meal  at  noon,  and  to  eat  a  hearty  meal  when  your  work  is 
done  and  you  can  rest.  Two  light  meals  and  a  hearty  meal 
are  all  that  any  system  needs,  and  you  can  prove  it  to  your- 
self by  trying  it,  and  watching  your  weight  once  a  week. 

I  have  tried  many  experiments,  and  the  conclusion  to  which 
I  have  come  is  that  there  is  no  virtue  in  any  particular  meal- 
hours  or  any  particular  nufnber  of  meals.  For  several  years 
I  tried  the  experiment  of  two  meals  a  day.  I  was  living 
a  retired  life,  and  had  little  contact  with  the  world,  and  I 
would  make  a  hearty  meal  at  ten  o'clock  in  the  morning,  and 
another  at  five  in  the  afternoon.  But  later  on  I  found  that 
inconvenient,  and  now  I  take  a  light  breakfast,  and  two  mod- 
erate-sized meals  at  the  conventional  hours  of  lunch  and 
dinner.  I  can  arrange  my  own  time,  so  after  meal  times  is 
11 


148  Mind  and  Body 

when  I  get  my  reading  done.  Sometimes,  when  I  am  tired, 
I  feel  sleepy  after  meals,  but  I  have  learned  not  to  yield  to 
this  impulse.  I  do  not  know  how  to  explain  this;  I  have 
observed  that  animals  sleep  after  eating,  and  it  appears  to 
be  a  natural  thing  to  do;  but  I  know  that  if  I  go  to  sleep 
after  a  meal,  nature  makes  clear  to  me  that  I  have  made  a 
mistake,  and  I  do  not  repeat  it.  I  never  eat  at  night,  and 
always  go  to  bed  on  an  empty  stomach,  so  I  am  always  hungry 
when  I  open  my  eyes  in  the  morning.  I  never  know  what  it 
is  not  to  be  hungry  at  meal  times,  and  my  habits  are  so 
regular  that  I  could  set  my  watch  by  my  stomach. 

Another  common  habit  which  is  harmful  is  eating  be- 
tween meals.  I  have  known  people  who  are  accustomed  to 
nibble  at  food  nearly  all  the  time.  Shelley  records  that  he 
tried  it  as  an  experiment,  thinking  it  might  be  a  convenient 
way  to  get  digestion  done — but  he  found  that  it  did  not  work. 
The  stomach  is  apparently  meant  to  work  in  pulses;  to  do 
a  job  of  digesting,  and  then  to  rest  and  accumulate  the  juices 
for  another  job.  It  will  accustom  itself  to  a  certain  regime, 
and  will  work  accordingly,  but  if,  when  it  has  half  digested 
a  load  of  food,  you  pile  more  food  in  on  top,  you  make  as 
much  trouble  as  you  would  make  in  your  kitchen  if  you 
required  your  cook  to  prepare  another  meal  before  she  has 
cleaned  up  after  the  last  one.  Three  times  a  day  is  enough 
for  any  adult  to  eat.  Children  require  to  eat  oftener,  be- 
cause their  bodies  are  more  active,  and  they  not  merely  have 
to  keep  up  weight,  but  to  add  to  it.  The  simplest  way  to 
arrange  matters  with  children  is  to  give  them  three  good 
meals  at  the  hours  when  adults  eat,  and  then  to  give  them  a 
couple  of  pieces  of  fruit  between  breakfast  and  lunch,  and 
again  between  lunch  and  supper.  I  have  never  seen  a  child 
who  would  not  be  satisfied  with  this,  when  once  the  habit 
was  established. 

I  have  already  spoken  of  the  cooking  and  serving  of  food. 
I  consider  that  the  "gastronomic  art,"  as  it  is  pompously 
called,  is  ninety-nine  per  cent  plain  rubbish.  To  be  sure,  if 
foods  are  appetizingly  prepared,  and  look  good  and  smell 
good  and  taste  good,  they  will  cause  the  gastric  juices  to  flow 
abundantly,  as  the  Russian  scientist  Pavlov  has  demonstrated 
hy  practical  experiment  with  the  stomach-pump.  But  I  know 
without  any  stomach-pump  that  the  best  thing  to  make  my 
gastric  juices  flow  is  hard  work  and  a  spare  diet.     When  I 


The  Book  of  the  Body  149 

come  home  from  five  sets  of  tennis,  and  have  a  cold  shower 
and  a  rub-down,  my  gastric  juices  will  flow  for  a  piece  of 
cold  beefsteak  and  a  cold  sweet  potato,  quite  as  well  as  for 
anything  that  is  served  by  a  leisure  class  "chef."  Needless 
to  say,  I  want  food  to  be  fresh,  and  I  want  it  to  be  clean, 
but  I  have  other  things  to  do  with  my  time  and  money  than 
to  pamper  my  appetites  and  encourage  food  whims. 

If  you  have  a  grandmother,  or  ever  had  one,  you  know 
what  grandmothers  tell  you  about  "hot  nourishing  food";  but 
I  have  tried  the  experiment,  and  satisfied  myself  that  there 
is  absolutely  no  difference  in  nourishing  qualities  between  hot 
food  and  cold  food.  If  you  chew  your  food  sufficiently,  it  will 
all  be  ninety-eight  and  six-tenths  degree  food  when  it  gets 
to  your  stomach,  and  that  is  the  way  your  stomach  wants  it. 
Of  course,  if  you  have  been  out  in  a  blizzard,  and  are  chilled, 
and  want  to  restore  the  body  temperature,  a  hot  drink  wijl 
be  one  of  the  quickest  ways,  and  if  the  emergency  is  extreme, 
you  may  even  add  a  stimulant.  On  the  other  hand,  if  you 
are  suffering  from  heat,  it  is  sensible  to  cool  your  body  by 
a  cold  drink.  But  you  should  use  as  much  judgment  with 
yourself  as  you  would  with  a  horse,  which  you  do  not  permit 
to  drink  a  lot  of  cold  water  when  he  is  heated  up,  and  is 
going  into  his  stall  to  stand  still. 

I  have  mentioned  the  word  "stimulants,"  and  this  opens 
a  large  subject.  There  are  drugs  which  affect  the  body  in 
two  different  ways :  some  excite  the  nerves,  and  through  the 
nerves  the  heart  and  blood-stream,  to  more  intense  activity; 
others  have  the  effect  of  deadening  the  nerves,  and  dulling 
the  sense  of  exhaustion  and  pain.  One  of  these  groups  is 
called  stimulants,  and  the  other  is  called  narcotics;  but  as  a 
matter  of  fact  the  stimulants  are  really  narcotics,  because  they 
operate  by  dulling  the  nerves  whose  function  it  is  to  prevent 
the  over-accumulation  of  fatigue  poisons ;  in  other  words, 
they  keep  the  nerves  and  muscles  from  knowing  that  they 
are  tired,  and  so  they  go  on  working. 

It  is  possible,  of  course,  to  conceive  of  an  emergency  in 
which  that  is  necessary.  Once  upon  a  time,  on  a  hunting  trip, 
I  had  been  traveling  all  day,  and  was  caught  in  a  rain  storm, 
and  exhausted  and  chilled  to  the  bone;  I  had  to  make  camp 
without  a  fire,  so  when  I  got  the  tent  up  I  wrapped  myself 
in  blankets  and  drank  a  couple  of  tablespoons  full  of  whiskey. 
That  is  the  only  time  I  have  ever  taken  whiskey  in  my  life. 


150  MmD  AND  Body 

and  it  warmed  me  almost  instantly,  and  did  me  no  harm.  In 
the  same  way  there  were  two  or  three  occasions  when  I  was 
on  the  verge  of  a  nervous  breakdown,  and  could  not  sleep, 
and  let  the  doctor  give  me  a  sleeping  powder.  But  in  each 
case  I  knew  that  I  was  fooling  with  a  dangerous  habit,  and 
I  did  no  more  fooling  than  necessary.  No  one  should  make 
use  of  either  stimulants  or  narcotics  except  in  extreme  emer- 
gency, and  never  but  a  few  times  in  a  lifetime.  What  you 
should  do  is  to  change  your  habits  so  that  you  will  not  need 
to  over-strain. 

All  these  drugs  are  habit  forming;  that  is  to  say,  they 
leave  the  body  no  better,  and  with  a  craving  for  a  repetition 
of  the  relief.  When  you  are  tired,  it  is  because  your  muscles 
and  nerves  are  storing  up  fatigue  poisons  more  rapidly  than 
your  blood-stream  can  get  rid  of  them.  You  need  to  know 
about  this  condition,  and  exhaustion  and  pain  are  nature's 
protective  warning.  If  you  put  a  stop  to  the  warning,  you 
are  as  unintelligent  as  the  Eastern  despots  who  used  to  cut 
off  the  head  of  the  messenger  who  brought  bad  tidings.  If, 
when  you  have  a  headache,  you  go  into  a  drug  store  and  let 
the  druggist  mix  you  one  of  those  white  fizzy  drinks,  what 
you  are  doing  is  not  to  get  rid  of  the  poisons  in  your  blood- 
stream, but  merely  to  reduce  the  action  of  your  heart,  so 
as  to  keep  the  blood  from  pressing  so  fast  into  the  aching 
blood  vessels  and  nerves.  You  may  try  that  trick  with  your 
heart  a  number  of  times,  but  sooner  or  later  you  will  try  it 
once  too  often — ^your  heart  will  stop  a  little  bit  quicker  than 
you  meant  it  to! 

Drugs  are  poisons,  and  their  action  depends  upon  their 
poisoning  some  particular  portion  of  the  body,  and  tempo- 
rarily paralyzing  it.  And  bear  this  in  mind,  they  are  none 
the  less  poisonous  because  they  are  "natural"  products.  You 
can  kill  yourself  by  cyanide  of  potassium,  which  comes  out 
of  a  chemist's  retort;  but  you  can  kill  yourself  just  as  dead 
with  laudanum,  which  comes  out  of  a  plant,  or  with  the  con- 
tents of  the  venom  sac  of  a  snake.  You  are  poisoning  your- 
self none  the  less  certainly  if  you  use  alcohol,  which  is  made 
from  the  juices  of  beautiful  fruits,  and  has  had  hosts  of 
famous  poets  writing  songs  about  it;  or  you  can  poison 
yourself  with  the  caffein  which  you  get  in  a  lovely  brown 
bean  which  comes  from  Brazil,  fragrant  to  the  nostrils  and 
delicious  to  the  taste.    You  may  drink  wine  and  tea  and  coffee 


The  Book  of  the  Body  151 

for  a  hundred  years,  and  have  your  picture  published  in  the 
newspapers  as  a  proof  that  these  habits  conduce  to  health; 
but  nothing  will  be  said  about  the  large  number  of  people 
who  practiced  these  habits,  and  didn't  live  so  long,  and  about 
how  long  they  might  have  lived  if  they  hadn't  practiced  these 
habits. 

I  was  brought  up  in  the  South,  and  my  "elders"  belonged 
to  a  generation  which  had  grown  up  in  war  time.  For  this 
reason  many  of  the  men  both  drank  and  smoked  to  excess, 
and  in  my  boyhood  I  lived  among  them  and  watched  them, 
and  with  the  help  of  advice  from  a  wise  mother,  I  conceived 
a  horror  of  every  kind  of  stimulant.  The  alcoholic  poets 
could  not  fool  me;  I  had  been  in  the  alcoholic  wards  of  the 
hospitals.  I  had  seen  one  man  after  another,  beautiful  and 
kindly  and  gracious  men,  dragged  down  into  a  pit  of  tor- 
ment and  shame. 

Alcohol  is,  I  think,  the  greatest  trap  that  nature  ever  set 
for  the  feet  of  the  human  race.  It  is  responsible  for  more 
degradation  and  misery  than  any  other  evil  in  the  world ; 
and  I  say  this,  knowing  well  that  my  Socialist  friends  will 
cry,  "What  about  Capitalism?"  My  answer  is  that  I  doubt 
if  there  ever  would  have  been  any  Capitalism  in  the  world, 
if  it  had  not  been  for  alcohol.  If  the  workers  had  not  been 
systematically  poisoned,  and  all  their  savings  taken  from 
them  by  the  gin-mill,  they  would  never  have  submitted  to 
the  capitalist  system,  they  would  have  built  the  co-operative 
commonwealth  at  the  time  they  were  building  the  first  fac- 
tories. I  listen  to  the  arguments  of  my  radical  friends  about 
"personal  liberty,"  but  I  note  that  in  Russia,  when  it  was  a 
question  of  making  a  practical  revolution  and  keeping  it  alive, 
the  first  thing  the  leaders  did  was  to  drag  out  the  contents 
of  the  wine-cellars  of  the  palaces,  and  smash  them  in  the 
gutters. 

Tea  and  coflFee  are,  of  course,  much  milder  in  their  effects 
than  alcohol ;  you  can  play  with  them  longer,  and  the  punish- 
ment will  be  less  severe.  But  if  you  make  habitual  use  of 
them,  you  will  pay  the  penalty  which  all  drugs  exact  from 
the  system.  Your  brain  and  your  nerve  centers  will  be  less 
sensitive,  less  capable  of  working  except  under  the  influence 
of  drugs;  their  reacting  power  will  be  dulled,  and  they  will 
•wear  out  more  quickly.  I  have  watched  the  slaves  of  the 
"morning  cup  of  coffee,"  and  know  how  they  suffer  when 


152  Mind  and  Body 

they  do  not  get  it.  Likewise,  I  have  watched  the  tea  drinkers. 
It  is  comical  to  live  in  England,  and  see  all  the  able-bodied 
men  obliged  to  leave  their  work  at  four  o'clock  in  the  after- 
noon, and  seek  the  regular  stimulus  for  their  tired  nerves. 
If  you  are  to  meet  anybody,  it  is  always  for  "tea"  that  the 
ceremony  is  set,  and  if  you  refuse  to  drink  tea,  your  hostess 
will  be  uncomfortable,  unable  to  talk  about  anything  but  the 
strange,  incredible  notion  that  one  can  live  without  tea.  I 
discovered  after  a  while  the  solution  of  this  problem;  I 
would  say  that  I  preferred  a  little  hot  water,  if  you  please, 
and  so  my  hostess  would  pour  me  a  cup  of  hot  water,  and  I 
would  sit  and  gravely  sip  it,  and  everybody  would  be  per- 
fectly content:  I  was  conforming  to  the  outward  appearance 
of  normality,  which  is  what  the  British  conventions  require. 

I  have  never  drunk  a  cup  of  coffee,  so  I  do  not  know 
what  its  effect  on  me  would  be.  But  some  fifteen  years  ago 
I  drank  a  glass  of  very  weak  iced  tea  at  eight  o'clock  in  the 
evening,  and  did  not  get  to  sleep  until  four  or  five  the  next 
morning.  So  I  know  that  there  is  really  a  drug  in  tea.  I 
know  also  that  I  might  accustom  my  system  to  it,  just  as  I 
might  learn  to  poison  my  lungs  with  nicotine  without  being 
made  immediately  and  suddenly  ill;  but  why  should  I  wish 
to  do  this?  Life  is  so  interesting  to  me  that  I  do  not  need 
to  stimulate  my  brain  centers  in  order  to  appreciate  the  thrill 
of  it.  And  when  I  am  tired,  I  can  rest  myself  by  listening 
to  music,  or  by  reading  a  worth-while  novel — ^things  which  I 
have  found  do  not  leave  the  after  effects  of  nicotine. 

I  remember  the  first  time  I  met  Jack  London.  Our  meet- 
ing consisted  in  good  part  of  his  "kidding"  me,  because  I 
was  lacking  in  the  congenial  vices  of  the  cafe.  He  told  me 
how  much  I  had  missed,  because  I  had  never  been  drunk; 
one  ought  to  try  the  great  adventure,  at  least  once!  Poor 
Jack  is  gone,  because  his  kidneys  gave  out  at  forty;  and 
nothing  could  seem  more  ungracious  than  to  point  out  that 
I  am  still  alive,  and  finding  life  enjoyable.  Yet,  in  this 
book  we  are  trying  to  find  out  how  to  live,  and  if  there  are 
habits  which  wreck  and  destroy  a  magnificent  physique,  and 
bring  a  great  genius  to  death  at  the  age  of  forty — surely  the 
rest  of  us  want  to  know  about  it,  and  to  be  warned  in  time. 
I  mention  Jack  London  in  this  connection,  because  he  has 
said  the  last  word  on  the  subject  of  alcohol.  Read  "John 
Barleycorn,"   and   especially    read   between  the   lines    of    it. 


The  Book  of  the  Body  153 

and  you  will  not  need  my  argument  to  persuade  you  to  be 
glad  that  the  Eighteenth  Amendment  has  been  written  into 
the  Constitution,  and  that  it  is  your  duty  as  a  Socialist,  not 
merely  to  obey  it,  but  to  vote  for  its  enforcement. 

I  am  proceeding  on  the  assumption  that  your  life  is  of 
importance  to  you ;  that  you  have  a  job  to  do  which  you  know 
to  be  worth  while,  and  to  which  you  desire  to  apply  your 
powers.  You  agree  with  me  that  the  workers  of  the  world 
are  suffering,  and  that  it  is  necessary  for  them  to  find  their 
freedom,  and  that  this  takes  hard  work  and  hard  thinking. 
You  may  say  that  I  exaggerate  the  amount  of  harm  that  is 
done  to  the  system  by  tea  and  coffee,  alcohol  and  tobacco. 
Well,  let  us  assume  that  in  moderate  quantities  they  do  no 
harm  at  all:  even  so,  I  have  the  right  to  ask  you  to  show 
that  they  do  some  good ;  otherwise,  surely,  it  is  a  mistake  for 
the  workers  to  spend  their  savings  upon  them. 

Consider,  for  example,  the  amount  of  money  which  the 
wage  slaves  of  the  world  spend  upon  tobacco.  Suppose  they 
could  be  persuaded  for  two  or  three  years  to  spend  this 
amount  upon  good  reading  matter — do  you  not  think  there 
would  be  an  improvement  in  their  condition?  Surely  you 
cannot  maintain  that  the  use  of  tobacco  is  necessary  to  the 
activities  of  the  brain!  Surely  you  do  not  think  that  a  man 
has  to  have  a  cigarette  in  order  to  stimulate  his  thoughts,  or 
to  smoke  a  pipe  to  rest  himself  after  his  work  is  done!  I 
offer  myself  as  evidence  in  such  a  controversy;  I  have  writ- 
ten as  many  books  as  any  man  in  the  radical  movement,  and 
the  sum  total  of  my  lifetime  smoking  amounts  to  one-half 
of  one  cigarette.  I  tried  that  when  I  was  eight  years  old,  and 
somebody  told  me  a  policeman  would  arrest  me  if  he  caught 
me,  and  I  threw  away  the  cigarette,  and  ran  and  hid  in  an 
alley,  and  have  not  yet  got  over  my  scare. 

In  the  "Journal  for  Industrial  Hygiene"  for  October,  1920, 
is  an  article  entitled  "Fatigue  and  Efficiency  of  Smokers  in  a 
Strenuous  Mental  Occupation."  Experiments  were  conducted 
among  telegraph  operators,  and  the  result  showed  that  "the 
heavy  smokers  of  the  group  show  a  higher  output  rate  at 
the  beginning  of  the  day  than  the  light  smokers,  but  their 
rate  falls  off  more  markedly  in  the  late  hours,  and  their 
production  for  the  whole  day  is  definitely  less  than  that  of 
the  light  smokers.  The  heavy  smokers  also  show  less  ability 
than  the  light  smokers  to  respond  to  increasing  pressure  of 


154  Mind  and  Body 

work  in  the  late  hours  of  the  day  by  handling  their  full  6hare 
of  the  work  presented." 

One  point  upon  which  every  medical  authority  agrees  is — 
that  the  use  of  nicotine  is  of  deadly  effect  upon  the  immature 
organism.  Half-grown  youths  who  smoke  cigarettes  will 
never  be  full-sized  men ;  they  will  never  have  normal  lungs 
or  a  normal  heart.  And  likewise,  all  authorities  agree  about 
the  effect  of  smoking  upon  the  organism  of  women.  I  gave 
what  little  help  I  could  to  the  task  of  helping  to  set  women  free, 
and  to  make  them  the  equals  of  men ;  but  I  was  always  pained 
when  I  discovered  that  some  of  my  feminist  friends  understood 
by  woman's  emancipation  no  more  than  her  right  to  adopt  men's 
vices.  I  would  say  to  these  ardent  young  female  radicals,  who 
cultivate  the  art  of  dangling  a  cigarette  from  their  lower  lip, 
and  sip  cocktails  out  of  coffee-cups  in  Greenwich  Village 
cafes,  that  they  will  never  be  able  to  bear  sound  children ; 
but  I  know  that  this  would  not  interest  them — they  don't 
want  to  bear  any  children  at  all.  So  I  say  that  they  will 
never  be  able  to  think  straight  thoughts,  and  will  be  nervous 
invalids  when  they  are  thirty. 

We  went  to  war  to  make  the  world  safe  for  democracy, 
and  we  put  several  millions  of  our  young  men  into  armies, 
and  if  there  were  any  of  them  who  did  not  already  know 
how  to  smoke  cigarettes,  they  learned  it  imder  official  sanc- 
tion. So  now  we  have  a  national  tobacco  bill  that  runs  up 
to  two  billions,  and  will  insure  us  a  new  generation  of  "Class 
C"  rating.  Speaking  to  the  young  radicals  who  are  reading 
my  books,  I  say :  We  want  to  make  the  world  over,  to  make 
it  a  place  of  freedom  and  kindness,  instead  of  the  hell  of 
greed  and  hate  that  it  is  today.  For  that  purpose  we  need 
a  new  moral  code,  and  we  can  never  win  our  victory  without 
it.  I  have  attended  radical  conventions,  sitting  in  unven- 
tilated  halls  amid  clouds  of  tobacco  smoke,  and  listening  to 
men  wrangle  all  through  the  day  and  a  great  part  of  the 
night ;  I  have  watched  the  fatal  dissensions  in  the  movement, 
the  quarrelings  of  the  right  wingers  and  the  left  wingers  and 
all  stages  and  degrees  in  between,  and  I  have  wondered — 
not  jestingly,  but  in  pitying  earnest — how  much  of  all  those 
personalities  and  factional  misunderstanding  had  their  origin 
in  carbon  dioxide  and  nicotine.  There  is  no  use  suggesting 
such  ideas  to  the  older  men,  whose  habits  are  fixed;  but  a 
new  generation  is  coming  on,  with  a  new  vision  of  the  enor- 


The  Book  of  the  Body  '        1^5 

mous  task  before  it;  and  is  it  too  much  to  expect  of  these 
young  men  and  women,  that  they  shall  realize  in  adrance 
the  grim  tasks  they  have  to  do,  and  shall  learn  to  run  the 
machine  of  their  body  so  as  to  get  out  of  it  the  maximum 
amount  of  service?  Is  it  too  much  to  hope  for,  that  some 
day  we  shall  have  a  race  of  young  fighters  for  truth  and 
justice,  who  are  willing  to  live  abstemious  lives,  and  con- 
secrate themselves  to  the  task  of  delivering  mankind  from 
wage  slavery  and  war? 


CHAPTER  XXIII 

MORE  ABOUT  HEALTH 

(Discusses  the  subjects  of  breathing  and  ventilation,  clothing, 
bathing  and  sleep.) 

In  discussing  the  question  of  health,  we  have  given  the 
greater  part  of  the  space  to  the  subject  of  diet,  for  the  rea- 
son that  experience  has  convinced  us  that  diet  is  two-thirds 
of  health,  and  that  nearly  always  in  disease  you  find  errors 
of  diet  playing  a  part.  There  are,  however,  other  important 
factors  of  health,  now  to  be  discussed. 

Everything  of  which  the  body  makes  use  is  taken  in 
the  form  of  food  and  drink,  with  the  exception  of  one  sub- 
stance, the  oxygen  we  get  out  of  the  air.  Every  time  we  draw 
a  breath  we  take  in  a  certain  amount  of  oxygen,  and  every 
time  we  expel  a  breath,  we  drive  out  a  certain  amount  of  a 
gas  called  carbon  dioxide,  which  is  what  the  body  makes  of 
the  fuel  it  burns.  The  body  can  get  along  for  several  days 
without  water,  and  for  two  or  three  months  without  food,  but 
it  can  only  get  along  for  two  or  three  minutes  without  oxygen. 
It  should  be  obvious  that  when  the  body  expels  carbon  dioxide, 
with  a  slight  mixture  of  other  more  poisonous  gases,  and  sucks 
back  what  it  expects  will  be  a  fresh  supply  of  oxygen,  it 
wants  to  get  oxygen,  and  not  the  same  gases  it  has  just  ex- 
pelled, nor  gases  which  have  been  expelled  from  the  lungs 
of  other  people. 

In  the  days  when  primitive  man  lived  outdoors,  he  did 
not  have  to  think  about  this  problem.  When  he  breathed 
poison  from  his  lungs,  the  moving  air  of  nature  blew  it  away, 
and  the  infinite  vegetation  of  nature  took  the  carbon  dioxide 
and  turned  it  back  into  oxygen.  And  even  when  man  built 
himself  shelters,  he  was  not  cunning  enough  to  make  them 
air-tight;  he  had  to  leave  a  big  hole  for  the  smoke  to  get 
out,  and  smaller  holes  through  which  to  get  light.  But  now 
our  wonderful  civilization  has  solved  these  problems;  we 
make  our  walls  of  air-tight  plaster,  and  we  have  invented  a 
substance  which  will  admit  light  without  admitting  air.  So 
we  have  the  "white  plague"  of  tuberculosis,  and  so  we  have 

156 


The  Book  of  the  Body  157 

innumerable  minor  plagues  of  coughs  and  colds  and  sore 
throats. 

In  the  summer  time  the  solution  of  the  problem  is  easy. 
Have  as  many  doors  and  windows  in  your  home  as  possible, 
and  keep  them  open,  and  have  nothing  in  your  home  to  make 
dust  or  to  retain  dust.  But  then  comes  stormy  and  cold 
weather,  and  you  have  to  close  your  doors  and  windows,  and 
keep  your  home  at  a  higher  temperature  than  the  air  outside. 
How  shall  you  do  this,  and  at  the  same  time  get  a  continual 
supply  of  fresh  air? 

I  ;will  take  the  various  methods  of  heating  one  by  one. 
The  problem  in  each  case  is  simple  and  can  be  made  clear 
in  a  sentence  or  two. 

First,  the  open  fireplace.  This  is  a  perfect  solution,  if 
you  have  enough  fuel,  and  do  not  have  to  worry  about  the 
waste  of  heat.  An  open  fireplace  draws  out  all  the  air  in 
the  room  in  a  short  time,  and  you  do  not  have  to  bother 
about  opening  doors  or  windows;  you  may  be  sure  that  the 
air  is  getting  in  through  some  cracks,  or  else  the  fire  would 
not  burn. 

Second,  a  wood  or  coal  or  gas  stove  in  the  room,  provided 
with  a  proper  vent,  so  that  all  the  gases  of  combustion  are 
drawn  up  the  chimney.  This  changes  the  air  more  slowly 
than  an  open  fireplace,  but  it  does  the  work  fairly  well.  All 
that  you  have  to  be  careful  about  is  that  your  vent  is  suf- 
ficiently large  and  is  working  properly.  If  your  fire  does 
not  "draw,"  you  will  have  smoke  or  coal-gas  in  the  house, 
and  this  is  bad  for  the  lungs;  but  worse  for  the  lungs  is  a 
gas  that  you  can  neither  see  nor  smell  nor  taste,  the  deadly 
carbon  monoxide.  This  gas  is  produced  by  incomplete  com- 
bustion, and  whenever  you  see  yellow  flames  from  gas  or 
coal,  you  are  apt  to  have  this  poisonous  substance.  Small 
quantities  of  it  are  sufficient  to  cause  violent  headaches,  and 
repeated  doses  of  it  are  fatal.  Men  who  work  in  garages 
which  are  not  properly  ventilated  run  this  risk  all  the  time, 
because  carbon  monoxide  is  one  of  the  products  of  imper- 
fect combustion  in  the  gas  engine. 

Next,  the  furnace.  A  furnace  sends  fresh  warm  air  into 
your  house;  the  only  trouble  is  that  it  takes  out  all  the 
moisture,  and  some  authorities  say  that  this  is  bad  for  the 
lungs  and  throat.  I  do  not  know  whether  this  is  true,  but  all 
furnaces  are  supposed  to  have  a  water  chamber  to  supply 


158  Mind  and  Body 

moisture  to  the  air,  and  you  should  keep  a  pan  of  water  on 
every  stove  or  radiator  in  your  house. 

Next,  steam  heat,  which  includes  hot-water  heating.  This 
is  one  of  the  abominations  of  our  civihzation,  and  one  of  the 
methods  by  which  our  race  is  committing  suicide.  There  is 
nothing  wrong  about  steam  heat  in  itself ;  the  room  is  warmed 
in  a  harmless  way;  but  the  trouble  is  it  stays  warm  only  so 
long  as  the  doors  and  windows  are  kept  shut.  You  are  in 
an  air-tight  box,  and  can  be  warm  provided  you  do  not  mind 
being  suffocated.  The  moment  you  open  a  door  or  window, 
you  have  a  cold  draft  on  your  feet,  and  if  you  wish  to  change 
the  air  entirely  you  have  to  let  out  all  the  heat ;  so,  of  course, 
you  never  do  change  it  entirely,  but  go  on  breathing  the 
same  air  over  and  over,  and  every  time  you  breathe  it  the 
condition  of  your  body  is  a  little  more  reduced. 

The  solution  of  this  problem  is  not  to  heat  the  air  in  the 
room,  but  to  use  your  steam  coils  to  heat  fresh  air,  and  then 
drive  this  air,  already  warmed,  into  the  room,  at  the  same  time 
providing  a  vent  through  which  the  old  air  can  be  pushed  out. 
This  is  the  hot  air  system  of  heating,  and  it  requires  some  kind 
of  engine  or  dynamo,  and  therefore  is  expensive.  It  has  been 
installed  in  a  few  office  buildings  and  theaters.  One  of  the 
most  perfect  systems  I  ever  inspected  is  in  the  building  of 
the  New  York  Stock  Exchange,  where  the  air  is  warmed  in 
winter,  and  cooled  in  summer,  and  freed  from  dust,  and 
exactly  the  right  quantity  is  supplied.  It  is  a  humorous  com- 
mentary upon  our  civilization  that  we  take  perfect  care  of 
the  breathing  apparatus  of  our  stock-gamblers,  but  pay  no 
attention  to  the  breathing  apparatus  of  our  senators  and  con- 
gressmen, whose  one  business  in  life  is  to  use  their  lungs. 
The  stately  old  building  with  its  white  marble  domes  looks 
impressive  in  moving  pictures  and  on  illustrated  postcards, 
but  it  has  no  system  of  ventilation  whatever,  and  is  a  death- 
trap to  the  poor  wretches  who  are  compelled  to  spend  their 
days,  and  sometimes  their  nights,  within  its  walls.  This  con- 
trast is  one  symptom  of  the  rise  of  industrial  capitalism  and 
the  collapse  of  political  democracy. 

We  have  reserved  to  the  last  a  method  of  heating  which 
is  the  worst,  and  can  only  be  described  as  a  crime  against 
health:  the  use  of  gas  and  oil  stoves  set  out  in  the  middle 
of  the  room,  without  a  vent,  and  discharging  their  fumes  into 
the  room.    These  stoves  are  simply  instruments  of  slow  death. 


The  Book  of  the  Body  159 

and  their  manufacture  should  be  prohibited  by  law.  In  the 
meantime,  what  you  have  to  do  is  to  refuse  to  live  in  a 
room  or  to  work  in  an  office  where  such  stoves  are  used. 
I  have  heard  dealers  insist  that  this  or  the  other  kind  of 
gas  or  oil  stove  was  so  contrived  as  to  consume  all  the  fumes. 
Do  not  let  anybody  fool  you  with  such  nonsense.  There  has 
never  been  any  form  of  combustion  devised  which  consumes 
all  the  fumes.  No  such  thing  can  be,  because  the  products 
of  combustion  are  not  combustible.  The  so-called  "wickless 
blue  flame"  stoves  do  bum  all  the  oil,  and  a  properly  regu- 
lated gas  stove  will  burn  all  the  gas,  but  that  simply  means 
that  it  turns  the  oil  and  gas  into  carbon  dioxide,  the  very  sub- 
stance which  your  lungs  are  working  day  and  night  to  get 
out  of  your  body. 

Moreover,  there  is  no  oil  or  gas  stove  which  ever  bums 
perfectly  all  the  time,  either  because  there  is  too  much  gas 
or  insufficient  air.  Oil  and  gas  stoves  sometimes  give  a  partly 
yellow  flame.  You  can  cause  them  to  give  a  yellow  flame  at 
any  time  by  blowing  air  against  them,  and  that  yellow  flame 
means  imperfect  combustion,  and  a  probability  of  the  deadly 
carbon  monoxide.  These  facts  are  known  to  every  chemist  and 
to  every  student  of  hygiene,  and  the  fact  that  civilized  people 
continue  to  bum  such  oil  and  gas  stoves  in  their  homes  and 
offices  is  simply  one  more  proof  that  our  civilization  values 
human  welfare  and  health  at  nothing  whatever  in  compari- 
son with  profits. 

Not  merely  should  you  see  that  you  have  a  continuous 
supply  of  fresh  air  in  your  home,  but  you  should  try  to  keep 
down  dust  in  your  home,  and  especially  fine  particles  of  lint. 
Once  upon  a  time  our  ancestors  were  unable  to  make  houses 
and  floors  tight,  and  so  they  put  rugs  on  the  floors  and  hung 
tapestries  on  the  walls  to  keep  out  the  wind.  We  civilized 
people  are  able  to  make  both  floors  and  walls  absolutely  tight, 
and  yet  we  continue  to  use  rugs  and  curtains,  it  being  the 
first  principle  of  our  education  that  propriety  requires  us  to 
continue  to  do  the  things  which  our  ancestors  did.  I  am 
unable  to  think  of  a  more  silly  or  stupid  thing  in  the  world 
than  a  rug  or  a  curtain,  but  I  have  lived  in  the  house  with 
them  all  my  life,  because,  alas,  the  ladies  cannot  be  happy 
otherwise.  They  want  their  homes  to  be  "pretty,"  and  so 
they  continue  to  set  dust  traps,  and  to  set  themselves  futile 
jobs  of  house  cleaning  and  shopping. 


160  Mind  and  Body 

Not  all  of  us  are  able  to  be  out  of  doors  as  much  as  we  ought 
to  be,  but  all  of  us  spend  seven  or  eight  hours  out  of  every 
twenty-four  in  sleep,  and  this  time  at  least  we  ought  to  spend 
out  of  doors.  I  understand  that  this  is  futile  advice  to  give 
to  the  very  poor.  I  was  poor  myself  for  many  years,  and  had 
to  put  all  my  clothes  on  at  night  in  order  to  keep  warm,  and 
even  then  I  could  not  always  do  it.  Nevertheless,  from  the 
time  I  first  realized  the  importance  of  ventilation  I  never  slept 
in  a  room  with  a  closed  window. 

I  say,  sleep  outdoors  if  you  possibly  can.  You  do  not 
have  to  be  afraid  of  exposure,  for  cold  will  not  hurt  you  if 
you  keep  your  body  in  proper  condition.  I  have  slept  out 
in  a  rubber  blanket,  with  the  rain  beating  on  my  head  and 
face;  I  have  spread  a  rubber  blanket  on  a  hummock  in  the 
midst  of  a  swamp,  and  waked  up  in  the  morning  with  my 
hair  and  face  soaked  in  cold,  white  fog,  but  I  never  caught 
cold  from  such  things;  there  is  no  harm  whatever  in  damp- 
ness or  in  "night  air,"  if  you  are  in  proper  condition.  Of 
course,  you  may  get  your  ears  frostbitten  in  the  middle  of 
winter,  but  you  can  have  a  sleeping  hood  to  remove  that 
danger. 

The  "nature  cure"  enthusiasts,  who  lay  so  much  stress 
upon  an  outdoor  life,  also  insist  that  the  wearing  of  clothes 
is  a  harmful  civilized  custom.  They  urge  us  to  take  "sun 
baths"  and  to  "ventilate  the  skin."  Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
the  skin  does  not  breathe,  it  merely  gives  out  moisture,  and 
it  does  not  give  out  any  less  because  we  have  clothing  on  us, 
provided  the  clothing  is  dry  and  clean,  and  will  absorb  moist- 
ure. But  bye  and  bye  the  clothing  becomes  loaded  with  the 
•waste  substances  given  out  by  the  skin,  and  then  it  will 
absorb  no  more,  and  if  you  do  not  change  your  clothing,  no 
doubt  it  may  have  some  effect  upon  health. 

But  the  principal  evil  of  civilized  clothing  is  that  it  binds 
the  body  and  prevents  the  free  play  of  the  muscles,  and, 
more  important  yet,  stops  the  free  circulation  of  the  blood.  I 
have  already  discussed  hats,  which  are  the  principal  cause 
of  baldness.  I  will  go  to  the  other  extremity  of  the  body,  and 
mention  tight  shoes,  which,  strange  as  it  may  seem,  cause 
headaches  and  colds.  You  will  be  able  to  find  a  few  civilized 
men  with  normal  feet,  but  you  will  hardly  ever  find  a  woman 
whose  toes  are  not  crowded  together  and  misshapen.  I  have 
said  that  the  human  body  is  one  organism,  and  that  it  is  fed 


The  Book  of  the  Body  161 

and  its  health  maintained  by  the  blood-stream;  I  say  now 
that  the  circulation  of  the  blood  is  one  thing,  and  if  you  block 
it  at  any  one  place,  you  block  it  everywhere.  Of  course,  not 
all  the  blood-stream  goes  down  into  the  feet,  but  some  of 
it  does,  and  if  it  is  clogged  in  the  feet,  and  the  blood  vessels 
cramped  and  crowded,  there  is  a  certain  amount  of  poison 
kept  in  the  system,  which  the  system  should  have  got  rid  of. 

Why  do  women  wear  tight  shoes?  Because  the  leisure 
class  members  of  their  sex  have  been  kept  in  harems  and 
used  as  the  playthings  of  men.  To  be  fragile  and  delicate 
was  the  thing  admired  by  the  masters  of  wealth,  and  to  have 
small  hands  and  feet  was  a  sign  that  women  belonged  to  this 
parasite  class.  Therefore  at  all  hazards  women's  feet  must 
be  kept  small,  even  at  the  expense  of  their  health  and  happi- 
ness; and  so  they  put  themselves  up  on  several  inches  of 
heels,  which  cause  them  to  toddle  around  like  marionettes  on 
a  stage,  with  all  their  toes  crowded  down  into  a  lump. 

Why  do  men  wear  tight  bands  around  their  scalps,  which 
cause  their  hair  to  drop  out,  and  tight,  stiff  columns  around 
their  necks,  which  stop  the  circulation  of  the  blood  into  their 
heads,  and  cause  them  to  have  headaches  instead  of  ideas? 
The  reason  is  that  for  ages  the  rulers  of  the  tribe  have  wished 
to  demonstrate  publicly  their  superiority  to  the  common  herd, 
which  does  the  genial  tasks.  In  England  all  gentlemen 
wear  tall  black  silk  band-boxes  on  their  heads,  and  in  America 
they  have  a  choice  among  several  varieties  of  round  tight 
boxes.  All  men  who  work  in  offices  wear  stiflfly  starched 
collars  and  cuflfs,  as  a  means  of  demonstrating  their  supe- 
riority to  the  common  workers,  who  have  to  sweat  at  their 
necks.  I  think  it  is  not  too  much  to  hope  that  when  class 
exploitation  is  done  away  with,  we  shall  also  get  rid  of  these 
class  symbols,  and  choose  our  clothing  because  it  is  warm  and 
comfortable,  and  not  according  to  the  perverted  imbecilities  of 
"style." 

The  skin  gives  out  perspiration  which  is  greasy;  also  the 
skin  is  constantly  growing,  putting  out  layers  of  cells  which 
dry  up  and  are  worn  off.  We  need  to  bathe  with  soap  to 
remove  the  grease,  and  we  need  to  rub  with  a  towel  to  brush 
away  the  dead  cells  of  the  skin,  so  that  the  pores  may  be 
kept  open.  No  one  is  taking  care  of  his  body  who  does  not 
wash  and  rub  it  once  every  twenty-four  hours,  and  once  or 
twice  a  week  with  warm  water  and  soap.     It  is  often  stated 


M2  Mind  and  Body 

that  hot  baths  are  weakening,  but  I  have  never  found  it  so; 
however,  I  think  it  is  a  bad  practice  to  pamper  the  body, 
which  should  be  accustomed  to  the  shock  of  cold  water.  The 
rule  as  to  bathing,  both  as  to  temperature  and  time,  is  simple. 
If,  after  the  bath  and  rub-down,  your  body  has  reacted  and 
you  feel  vigorous  and  fresh,  that  bath  has  done  you  good. 
If,  on  the  other  hand,  you  feel  chilled  and  depressed,  then 
you  have  been  too  long  in  the  water,  or  its  temperature  was 
too  low.  Every  person  has  to  find  his  own  rules  in  such 
matters.  The  only  general  rule  is  that  as  one  grows  older 
the  body  reacts  less  quickly. 

All  day,  as  we  work  and  think,  we  store  up  more  poisons 
in  our  cells  than  the  body  can  get  rid  of,  and  the  time  comes 
when  the  cells  are  so  loaded  with  poisons  that  we  have  to 
stop  for  a  while,  and  let  our  blood-stream  clean  house.  The 
quantity  of  sleep  one  needs  is  a  problem  like  that  of  cold 
water;  each  person  has  to  find  his  own  rule.  In  general,  one 
needs  less  and  less  sleep  as  one  grows  older.  Infants  sleep 
the  greater  part  of  the  time;  growing  children  should  sleep 
ten  or  eleven  hours,  adults  seven  or  eight,  and  old  people, 
unless  they  have  let  themselves  get  fat,  generally  do  not  want 
to  sleep  more  than  six,  and  part  of  this  in  short  naps.  When 
you  sleep,  your  bodily  energies  relax,  and  you  make  less  heat, 
therefore  you  need  extra  clothing;  but  this  clothing  should 
never  cover  the  mouth  and  nose,  nor  should  it  be  so  heavy 
as  to  make  breathing  a  burden.  If  you  are  in  good  condition, 
it  will  do  you  no  harm  to  be  chilly  when  you  sleep,  except 
that  you  do  not  sleep  so  soundly.  Sleeping  too  much  is  just 
as  harmful  as  sleeping  too  little.  Nature  will  tell  you  that. 
The  important  thing,  as  in  all  other  problems  of  health,  is  to 
have  something  interesting  to  think  about,  some  exciting  work 
to  do  in  the  world,  and  then  you  will  sleep  as  little  as  you 
have  too. 


CHAPTER  XXIV 

WORK  AND  PLAY 

(Deals  with  the  question  of  exercise,  both  for  the  idle  and 
the  overworked.) 

In  discussing  the  important  question  of  exercise,  there  is 
one  fundamental  fact  to  begin  with:  that  our  present  civili- 
zation divides  men  sharply  into  two  classes,  those  who  do 
not  get  enough  exercise,  and  those  who  get  too  much. 
Obviously  it  would  be  folly  to  make  the  same  recommenda- 
tions to  the  two  classes. 

I  begin  with  those  who  get  too  much  exercise.  They 
include  a  great  number,  probably  the  majority  of  those  who 
do  the  manual  work  of  the  world.  They  include  the  farmers 
and  the  farm-hands,  who  work  from  dawn  to  sunset,  and 
sometimes  by  lantern  light.  They  include  also  the  farmers' 
wives,  the  kitchen  slaves  of  whom  the  old  couplet  tells: 

"Man's  work  ends  from  sun  to  sun, 
But  woman's  work  is  never  done." 

I  am  aware  that  men  have  worked  that  way  for  count- 
less ages,  and  yet  the  race  is  still  surviving;  but  I  am  aware 
also  that  men  wither  up  with  rheumatism,  and  contract  chronic 
diseases  of  the  kidneys  and  the  blood  vessels,  consequent  upon 
the  creation  of  greater  quantities  of  fatigue  poisons  than  the 
body  can  regularly  eliminate. 

I  have  very  little  interest  in  the  past,  and  none  whatever 
in  finding  fault  with  it.  My  purpose  is  to  criticize  the  present 
for  the  benefit  of  the  future,  and  therefore  I  say  that  modern 
machinery  and  the  whole  development  of  modem  large-scale 
production  make  it  absolutely  unnecessary  that  women  should 
slave  all  their  waking  hours  in  kitchens,  or  that  men  should 
slave  all  day.  I  say  it  is  monstrous  folly  that  men  should 
work  for  twelve-hour  stretches  in  steel  mills,  and  for  ten  and 
eleven  hours  in  factories  and  mines.  Organized  labor  has 
adopted  the  slogan,  "Eight  hours  for  work,  eight  hoars  for 
sleep,  eight  hours  for  play";  but  my  slogan  is  "Four  hours 
for  work,  four  hours  for  study,  eight  hours  for  sleep,  and  eight 
hours  for  play." 

12  1«3 


164  Mind  and  Body 

I  know,  and  am  prepared  to  demonstrate  to  any  think- 
ing man,  that  modern  civilization  can  produce,  not  merely  all 
the  necessities,  but  all  the  comforts  of  life  for  every  man, 
woman  and  child  in  the  community,  by  the  expenditure  of 
four  hours  a  day  work  of  the  adult,  able-bodied  men  and 
women.  So  to  all  the  wage  slaves  of  the  factories  and  mines, 
the  fields  and  the  kitchens,  I  say  that  too  much  exercise  is 
what  is  the  matter  with  you,  and  what  you  need  is  to  get  off  in  a 
quiet  nook  in  the  woods  and  read  a  good  novel,  not  merely  for  a 
few  hours,  but  for  a  few  months,  until  you  get  over  the 
effects  of  capitalist  civilization.  I  know  that  not  many  of 
you  can  get  away  as  yet,  but  I  urge  you  to  insist  upon  getting 
away,  to  fight  for  the  chance  to  get  away;  and  I  will  here 
suggest  a  few  of  the  novels  for  you  to  read  when  finally  you 
do  get  away.  I  choose  the  easy  ones,  which  the  dullest  and 
most  tired  of  you  will  love;  I  say,  make  up  your  mind  to 
read  these  thirty-two  books  before  you  die,  and  do  not  let 
the  world  cheat  you  out  of  your  chance! 
/  Mark  Twain:  A  Connecticut  Yankee  in  King  Arthur's 
Court.  Charles  D.  Stewart:  The  Fugitive  Blacksmith.  W. 
Clark  Russell:  The  Wreck  of  the  Grosvenor.  R.  L.  Steven- 
son: Treasure  Island,  Kidnapped.  Jack  London:  The  Sea 
Wolf,  The  Call  of  the  Wild,  Martin  Eden.  Joseph  Conrad: 
Youth.  H.  G.  Wells :  The  War  of  the  Worlds,  When  the 
Sleeper  Wakes,  The  Sea  Lady,  The  History  of  Mr.  Polly, 
The  Food  of  the  Gods,  The  Island  of  Dr.  Moreau.  Upton 
Sinclair:  The  Jungle,  King  Coal,  Jimmie  Higgins,  100  Per 
Cent.  Theodore  Dreiser:  Sister  Carrie.  George  Moore: 
Esther  Waters.  Frank  Norris:  The  Octopus.  Brand  Whit- 
lock:  The  Turn  of  the  Balance.  De  Foe:  Robinson  Crusoe. 
Fielding:  Tom  Jones,  Jonathan  Wild  the  Great.  Thackeray: 
The  Adventures  of  Barry  Lyndon.  Marmaduke  Pickthall: 
The  Adventures  of  Hadji  Baba.  Blasco  Ibanez:  The  Fruit 
of  the  Vine.  Frank  Harris:  Montes  the  Matador.  Frederik 
van  Eeden :  The  Quest.    Tolstoi :  Resurrection. 

And  now  for  the  people  who  do  not  get  enough  exercise. 
In  the  armies  of  King  Cyrus  it  was  the  law  that  every  man 
was  required  to  sweat  once  every  twenty-four  hours,  and  that 
js  still  the  law  for  every  business  man  and  office-worker  and 
writer  of  books.  There  is  no  substitute  for  it,  and  there  is 
no  health  without  it.  I  have  heard  Dr.  Kellogg  say  that  the 
modern  woman  sends  out  her  health  with  her  washing,  and 


The  Book  of  the  Body  165 

I  have  heard  the  leisure  class  ladies  at  the  Sanitarium  dis- 
cuss this  cryptic  utterance  and  wonder  what  he  meant  by  it. 
I  know  that  there  is  use  telling  leisure  class  ladies  what  ex- 
ercise at  the  wash-tub  would  do  for  their  abdomens  and  backs. 
I  will  only  tell  them  that  unless  they  can  find  some  kind  of 
vigorous  activity  which  keeps  them  in  a  free  perspiration  for 
an  hour  or  two  each  day,  they  will  never  be  really  well,  and 
will  never  bear  children  without  agony  and  abortion. 

For  myself,  I  have  found  that  the  minimum  is  three  or 
four  times  a  week.  Unless  I  get  that  much  hard  exercise  I 
am  soon  in  trouble.  So  my  advice  to  the  business  man  is  to 
take  off  his  coat  and  collar  and  turn  out  and  help  his  truck- 
man; my  advice  to  the  white  collar  slave  is  to  get  a  part- 
time  job,  and  dig  ditches  the  rest  of  the  time.  To  the  man 
who  has  cares  which  pursue  him,  and  likewise  to  the  ardent 
student  and  brain-worker,  I  say  that  they  should  find,  not 
merely  exercise,  but  play.  The  distinction  between  the  two 
things  is  important.  There  can  be  play  that  is  not  exercise, 
'for  example  cards  and  chess;  and,  of  course,  there  can  be 
exercise  that  is  not  play.  What  you  must  have  is  something 
that  is  both  play  and  exercise;  something  that  not  merely 
causes  your  heart  to  beat  fast,  and  your  lungs  to  pump  fast, 
and  your  sweat  glands  to  throw  out  poisons  from  your  body, 
but  something  that  fully  occupies  your  mind  and  gives  your 
higher  brain  centers  a  chance  to  relax. 

Our  civilization  has  very  largely  destroyed  the  possibility 
of  play  and  the  spirit  of  play.  We  civilized  people  no  longer 
know  what  play  is,  and  regard  the  desire  to  play  as  something 
abnormal — a  form  of  vice.  We  allow  children  to  play  after 
school  hours,  and  on  Saturdays;  but  for  grown-up,  serious- 
minded  men  and  women  to  want  to  play  would  be  almost  as 
disreputable  as  for  them  to  want  to  get  drunk.  What  could 
be  more  pitiful  than  the  spectacle  of  tens  of  thousands  of  men 
crowding  into  our  baseball  parks  and  amusement  fields  to 
watch  other  men  play  for  them!  Imagine,  if  you  can,  a 
crowd  of  people  gathering  in  a  restaurant  or  theater  to  watch 
other  people  eat  for  them!  Imagine  yourself  a  man  from 
Mars,  coming  down  to  a  world  with  so  many  people  in  want, 
and  finding  whole  classes  of  men  forbidden  to  do  any  work, 
under  penalty  of  disgrace,  and  compelled,  in  order  to  exercise 
their  muscles,  to  pull  on  rubber  straps  and  lift  weights  and 
wave  dumb-bells  and  Indian  clubs  in  the  air — methods  of  ex- 


166  Mind  and  Body 

pending  their  muscular  energy  which  are  respectable  because 
they  accomplish  nothing! 

When  I  was  a  boy,  I  was  fond  of  all  kinds  of  games.  1 
was  a  good  tennis  player,  and  in  the  country  an  incessant 
hunter  and  fisherman.  When  on  the  city  streets  we  boys  could 
not  find  any  other  game  to  play,  we  would  get  up  on  the  roofs 
of  the  houses  and  throw  clothes-pins  and  snow-balls  at  the 
"Dagoes"  working  in  the  nearby  excavations;  so  we  had  the 
fine  game  of  being  chased  by  the  "Dagoes,"  with  the  chance, 
real  or  imaginary,  of  having  a  knife  stuck  into  us.  But  then, 
as  I  grew  older,  and  became  aware  of  the  pain  and  misery 
of  the  world,  I  lost  my  interest  in  games,  and  for  ten  years 
or  so  I  never  played ;  I  did  nothing  but  study  and  write.  So 
my  health  gave  way,  and  I  had  the  problem  of  restoring  it, 
and  I  spent  some  twenty  years  wrestling  with  this  problem, 
before  I  thoroughly  convinced  myself  on  the  point  that  there 
can  be  no  such  thing  as  sound  and  permanent  health  without 
a  certain  amount  of  play. 

I  don't  think  there  is  any  kind  of  hard  physical  work  I 
failed  to  try,  in  the  course  of  my  experiments.  I  rode  horse- 
back, and  took  long  walks,  and  climbed  mountains,  and  swam, 
and  dug  gardens,  and  chopped  down  whole  groves  of  trees 
and  cut  them  up  and  carried  them  to  the  fireplace.  I  have 
done  this  latter  work  for  a  whole  winter  in  the  country,  sev- 
eral hours  every  day,  and  it  has  done  my  health  no  good  to 
speak  of ;  I  have  been  ready  for  a  breakdown  at  the  end  of 
it.  The  reason  is  that  all  the  time  I  was  doing  these  things 
with  my  body,  I  was  going  right  on  working  my  brain.  While 
I  was  swimming  or  climbing  a  mountain  or  galloping  on  horse- 
back, I  was  absorbed  in  the  next  chapter  of  the  book  I  was 
writing,  so  that  I  literally  did  not  know  where  I  was.  I  would 
make  up  my  mind  that  I  would  not  think  about  my  work, 
and  would  make  desperate  efforts  not  to  do  so;  but  it  was 
like  walking  along  the  edge  of  a  slippery  ditch — sooner  or  later 
I  was  bound  to  fall  in,  and  go  floundering  along,  unable  to 
get  out  again ! 

And  the  same  thing  applies  to  all  gymnastic  work.  I  have 
experimented  with  a  dozen  different  systems  of  exercises,  and 
with  all  kinds  of  water  treatments;  I  have  used  dumb-bells 
and  Indian  clubs  and  Swedish  gymnastics,  MacFadden's  ex- 
ercises in  bed,  and  the  Yogi  breathing  exercises,  and  more 
Icinds  of  queer  things  than  I  can  remember  now ;  but  for  me 


The  Book  of  the  Body  16T 

there  is  only  one  solution  of  the  problem,  which  is  to  have 
an  antagonist.  It  may  be  a  deer  I  am  trying  to  shoot,  or 
some  trout  I  am  trying  to  lure  out  of  their  holes;  it  may  be 
some  boys  I  am  trying  to  beat  at  football  or  hockey,  or  it  may 
be  the  game  I  know  best  and  find  most  convenient,  which  is 
tennis.  If  it  is  tennis,  then  it  has  to  be  someone  who  can 
make  me  work  as  hard  as  I  know  how;  for  if  it  is  someone 
I  can  beat  easily,  why,  before  I  have  been  playing  ten  min- 
utes, I  am  busily  working  out  the  next  chapter  of  a  book, 
or  answering  letters  I  have  just  got  in  the  mail. 

Recently  I  came  upon  a  book,  "The  Psychology  of  Relax- 
ation," by  Dr.  Patrick,  in  which  the  theory  of  this  is  set  forth. 
Civilized  man  is  working  his  higher  brain  centers  more  than 
his  body  can  stand;  his  brain  is  running  away  with  him,  ab- 
sorbing a  constantly  increasing  share  of  his  energies.  True 
relaxation  is  only  possible  where  the  higher  brain  centers  are 
lulled,  and  the  back  lobes  of  the  brain  brought  into  activity. 
One  of  the  means  of  doing  this  is  alcohol,  and  that  is  why 
through  the  ages  all  races  of  men  have  craved  to  get  drunk. 
There  is  a  method  which  is  harmless,  and  does  not  break 
down  the  system,  and  that  is  play.  When  we  become  really 
interested  in  play,  we  are  as  children,  or  as  primitive  man; 
we  do  all  the  things  that  our  race  used  to  do  many  ages  ago ; 
we  hunt  and  fight,  we  pit  our  wits  against  the  wits  of  our 
enemies,  and  struggle  with  desperation  to  get  the  better  of 
them.  If  our  play  is  physical  play,  if  we  are  absorbed  in  a 
game  or  bodily  contest,  then  we  are  exerting  and  developing 
all  those  portions  of  us  which  civilization  tends  to  atrophy 
and  deaden. 

There  are  people  who  will  dispute  with  you  about  Social- 
ism, and  ask,  how  we  are  going  to  provide  incentives  if  we 
do  away  with  wage  slavery.  When  you  tell  them  that  activity 
is  natural  to  human  beings,  and  that  if  there  were  no  work, 
men  and  women  would  have  to  make  some,  they  shake  their 
heads  mournfully  and  tell  you  about  the  problem  of  "human 
nature."  But  consider  games  and  sports:  men  do  not  have 
to  work  their  bodies,  yet  they  go  out  and  deliberately  hunt 
for  trouble!  They  invent  themselves  subtle  and  complicated 
games,  and  are  not  content  until  they  find  people  who  can 
beat  them  at  it,  or  at  any  rate  can  make  them  work  to  the 
limit  of  their  strength,  until  they  are  in  a  dripping  perspira- 
tion and  thoroughly  exhausted !    I  may  be  too  optimistic  about 


168  Mind  and  Body 

"human  nature,"  but  I  believe  that  this  is  the  attitude  every 
normal  human  being  takes  toward  the  powers,  both  mental 
and  physical,  which  he  possesses;  he  wants  to  use  them,  and 
for  all  they  are  worth.  If  you  don't  believe  it,  just  take  any 
group  of  youngsters,  give  them  a  baseball  and  bat,  turn  them 
loose  in  a  vacant  lot,  and  watch  them  "choose  up  sides"  and 
fall  to  work,  screaming  and  shouting  in  wild  excitement! 
There  are  some  races  of  the  earth  which  do  not  yet  know 
baseball,  but  the  Filipinos  and  the  Japanese  have  learned  it, 
and  even  the  war-worn  "Poilus"  and  the  supercilious  "Tom- 
mies" condescended  to  experiment  with  it.  And  if  you  think 
it  is  only  physical  competition  that  young  human  animals  en- 
joy, try  them  at  putting  on  a  play,  or  printing  a  magazine,  or 
conducting  a  debate,  or  building  a  house — ^anything  whatever 
that  involves  healthy  competition,  and  is  related  to  the  big 
things  of  life,  but  without  being  for  the  profit  of  some  ex- 
ploiter! Get  clear  the  plain  and  simple  distinction  between 
work  and  play:  play  is  what  you  want  to  do,  while  work  is 
what  the  profit  system  makes  you  do! 


CHAPTER  XXV 

THE  FASTING  CURE 

(Deals  with  nature's  own  remedy  for  disease,  and  how  to  make 
use  of  it.) 

We  have'  next  to  consider  the  various  human  aihnents, 
what  causes  them,  and  how  they  can  be  remedied.  As  it 
happens,  I  know  of  a  cure  that  comes  pretty  near  being 
that  impossible  thing,  a  "cure-all."  At  any  rate,  it  is  so  far 
ahead  of  all  other  cures,  that  a  discussion  of  it  will  cover 
three-fourths  of  the  subject. 

When  I  was  a  boy  living  in  New  York,  there  was  a  man 
by  the  name  of  Dr.  Tanner,  who  took  a  forty-day  fast.  He 
was  on  public  exhibition  at  the  time,  and  was  supposed  to  be 
watched  day  and  night;  the  newspapers  gave  a  great  deal 
of  attention  to  the  story,  and  crowds  used  to  come  to  gaze  at 
him.  I  remember  very  well  the  conversations  I  heard  about 
the  matter.  People  were  quite  sure  that  it  couldn't  be  true. 
The  man  must  be  getting  something  to  eat  on  the  sly;  he 
must  have  some  nourishment  in  the  water  he  drank ;  no  human 
being  could  fast  more  than  five  or  six  days  without  starving 
to  death. 

In  the  year  1910  I  published  in  the  United  States  and 
England  a  magazine  article  telling  how  on  several  occasions 
I  had  fasted  ten  or  twelve  days,  and  what  I  had  accomplished 
by  it.  I  found  that  I  had  the  same  difficulty  to  confront  as 
old  Dr.  Tanner;  I  received  scores  of  letters  from  people  who 
called  me  a  "faker,"  and  I  read  scores  of  newspaper  editorials 
to  the  same  effect.  The  New  York  Times  published  a  dispatch 
about  three  young  ladies  on  Long  Island  who  were  trying 
a  three-day  fast,  and  the  Times  commented  editorially  to  the 
effect  that  these  young  ladies  were  "the  victims  of  a  shallow 
and  unscrupulous  sensationalist." 

The  notion  that  human  beings  can  perish  for  lack  of  food 
in  a  few  days  is  deeply  rooted  in  people's  minds.  Recently 
a  group  of  eleven  Irishmen  in  jail  set  to  work  to  starve  them- 
selves to  death,  as  a  protest  against  British  rule  in  their 
country.     Day  after  day  the  newspapers  reported  the  news 

169 


170  Mind  and  Body 

from  Q)rk  prison,  and  at  about  the  twentieth  day  they  began 
to  state  that  the  prisoners  were  dying,  that  the  priest  had 
been  sent  for,  that  their  relatives  were  gathered  on  the  prison 
steps.  Day  after  day  such  reports  continued,  through  the 
thirties,  and  the  forties,  and  the  fifties,  and  the  sixties,  and 
the  seventies.  One  man  died  on  the  eighty-eighth  day,  and 
MacSwiney  died  on  the  seventy-fourth.  The  other  nine  gave 
up  after  ninety-four  days  and  were  all  restored  to  health.  I 
watched  carefully  the  newspaper  and  magazine  comment  on 
this  incident,  yet  I  did  not  see  a  single  remark  on  the  med- 
ical aspects  of  it;  I  could  not  discover  that  scientific  men  had 
learned  anything  whatever  about  the  ability  of  the  body  to 
go  without  food  for  long  periods. 

Get  this  clear  at  the  outset:  Nobody  ever  "starved  to 
death"  in  less  than  two  months,  and  it  is  possible  for  a  fat 
person  to  go  without  food  for  as  long  as  three  or  four  months. 
People  who  "starve  to  death"  in  shorter  times  do  not  die  of 
starvation,  but  of  fright.  The  first  time  I  fasted  happened 
to  be  at  the  time  of  the  Messina  earthquake.  I  was  walking 
about,  perfectly  serene  and  happy,  having  been  without  food 
for  three  days,  and  I  read  in  my  newspaper  how  the  rescue 
ships  had  reached  Messina,  and  found  the  population  raven- 
ous, in  the  agonies  of  starvation,  some  of  the  people  having 
been  without  food  for  seventy-two  hours!  (It  sounds  so 
much  worse,  you  see,  when  you  state  it  in  hours.) 

The  second  point  to  get  clear  is  that  the  fast  is  a  physio- 
logical process;  that  is  to  say,  it  is  something  which  nature 
understands  and  carries  through  in  her  own  serene  and  efficient 
way.  When  you  take  a  fast,  you  are  not  carrying  out  a  freak 
notion  of  your  own,  or  of  mine;  you  are  discovering  a  lost 
instinct.  Every  cat  and  dog  knows  enough  not  to  take  food 
when  it  is  ill ;  it  is  only  in  hospitals  conducted  by  modern 
medical  science  that  the  custom  prevails  of  serving  elaborate 
"trays"  to  invalids.  I  remember  a  story  about  a  man  who 
made  himself  a  reputation  and  a  fortune  by  curing  the  pet 
dogs  of  the  rich.  These  beautiful  little  creatures,  which  sleep 
between  silken  covers,  and  have  several  servants  to  wait  upon 
them,  and  are  fed  from  gold  and  silver  dishes  upon  rich  and 
elaborately  cooked  foods,  fall  victim  to  as  many  diseases  as 
their  mistresses,  and  they  would  be  brought  to  this  specialist, 
who  conducted  his  dog  hospital  in  an  old  brickyard.  In  each 
one  of  the  compartments  of  the  brick  kiln  he  would  shut  up 


The  Book  of  the  Body  171 

a  dog  with  a  supply  of  fresh  water,  a  crust  of  stale  bread, 
a  piece  of  bacon  rind,  and  the  sole  of  an  old  shoe;  and  after 
a  few  days  he  would  go  back  and  find  that  the  dog  had  eaten 
the  crust  of  bread,  and  then  he  would  write  to  the  owner 
that  the  dog  was  on  the  high  road  to  recovery.  He  would 
go  back  a  few  days  later  and  find  that  the  dog  had  eaten 
the  piece  of  bacon  rind,  and  then  he  would  write  that  the 
dog  was  very  nearly  cured.  He  would  wait  until  the  dog 
had  eaten  the  piece  of  shoe  leather,  and  then  he  would  write 
that  the  dog  was  completely  cured,  and  the  owner  might  come 
and  take  it  away. 

Just  what  is  the  process  of  the  fast  cure?  I  do  not  pre- 
tend to  know  positively.  I  can  only  make  guesses,  and  wait 
for  science  to  investigate.  I  believe  that  the  main  source  of 
the  diseases  of  civilized  man  is  improper  nutrition,  and  the 
clogging  of  the  system  with  food  poisons  in  various  stages. 
And  when  you  fast  you  do  two  things :  first,  you  stop  entirely 
the  fresh  supply  of  those  food  poisons,  and  second,  you  allow 
the  whole  of  the  body's  digestive  and  assimilative  tract  to 
rest — ^to  go  to  sleep,  as  it  were — so  that  all  the  body's  energy 
may  go  to  other  organs.  The  body  carries  with  it  at  all 
times  a  surplus  store  of  nutriment,  which  can  be  taken  up 
and  used  by  the  blood  stream,  apparently  with  much  less 
trouble  than  is  required  to  convert  fresh  food  to  the  body's 
uses.  In  other  words,  the  body  can  feed  on  its  own  tissues 
more  easily  than  it  can  feed  from  the  stomach.  In  the  fast  you 
may  lose  anywhere  from  half  a  pound  to  two  pounds  in  weight 
per  day,  and  this  will  be  taken,  first  from  your  store  of  fat,  and 
then  from  your  muscular  tissues.  Every  part  of  your  muscular 
tissue  will  be  taken,  before  anything  is  taken  from  your  vital 
organs,  vour  nerves  or  your  blood-stream.  So  long  as  there  is 
a  particle  of  muscular  material  left,  so  long  as  you  can  make 
even  the  slightest  movement  of  one  finger,  you  are  still  fasting, 
and  it  is  only  when  your  muscular  tissue  is  all  gone  that  you 
begin  at  last  to  starve.  So  far  as  I  know,  the  cases  of  Mac- 
Swiney  and  the  other  Irishman  are  the  only  cases  on  record 
where  fasters  have  died  of  starvation. 

What  the  body  does  during  the  fast  is  quite  plain,  and 
can  be  told  by  many  symptoms.  It  begins  a  thorough  house- 
cleaning,  throwing  out  poisonous  material  by  every  channel. 
The  perspiration  and  the  breath  become  offensive,  the  tongue 
becomes  heavily  coated,  so  that  you  can  scrape  the  material 


172  Mind  and  Body 

off  with  a  knife.  I  have  heard  vegetarians  explain  this  by 
saying  that  when  the  body  is  hving  off  its  own  tissues,  it  is 
following  a  cannibal  diet;  but  that  is  all  nonsense,  because 
you  can  live  on  meat  exclusively,  and  quickly  satisfy  yourself 
that  none  of  these  symptoms  occurs.  It  is  evident  that  the 
body  is  taking  advantage  of  the  opportunity  to  get  rid  of  waste 
products;  and  this  will  go  on  for  ten  days,  for  twenty  days, 
in  some  cases  for  as  long  as  forty  or  fifty  days;  and  then 
suddenly  occurs  a  strange  thing:  in  spite  of  the  "cannibal 
diet"  the  symptoms  all  come  to  a  sudden  end.  The  tongue 
clears,  the  breath  becomes  sweet,  the  appetite  suddenly 
awakens. 

During  the  period  of  a  normal  fast  you  lose  all  interest  in 
food.  You  almost  forget  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  eating ; 
you  can  look  at  food  without  any  more  desire  for  it  than  you 
have  to  swallow  marbles  and  carpet  tacks.  But  then  suddenly 
appetite  returns,  as  I  have  explained,  and  you  find  that  you 
can  think  of  nothing  but  food.  This  is  what  students  of  the 
subject  describe  as  a  "complete  fast,"  and  while  I  do  not  want 
to  go  to  extremes  and  say  that  the  "complete  fast"  will  cure 
every  case  of  every  disease,  I  can  certainly  say  this:  in  the 
letters  which  have  come  to  me  from  people  who  tried  the  fast 
at  my  suggestion,  there  are  cases  of  every  kind  of  common 
disease.  In  my  book,  "The  Fasting  Cure,"  I  give  the  results 
in  cases  reported  to  me  after  the  publication  of  my  first  mag- 
azine article.     I  quote  two  paragraphs: 

"The  total  number  of  fasts  taken  was  277,  and  the  average 
number  of  days  was  six.  There  were  90  of  five  days  or  over, 
51  of  ten  days  or  over,  and  six  of  30  days  or  over.  Out  of 
the  119  person  who  wrote  to  me,  100  reported  benefit,  and 
17  no  benefit.  Of  these  17  about  half  give  wrong  breaking 
of  the  fast  as  the  reason  for  the  failure.  In  cases  where 
the  cure  had  not  proved  permanent,  about  half  mentioned 
that  the  recurrence  of  the  trouble  was  caused  by  wrong  eat- 
ing, and  about  half  of  the  rest  made  this  quite  evident  by 
what  they  said.  Also  it  is  to  be  noted  that  in  the  cases  of 
the  17  who  got  no  benefit,  nearly  all  were  fasts  of  only  three 
or  four  days. 

"Following  is  the  complete  list  of  diseases  benefited — 45 
of  the  cases  having  been  diagnosed  by  physicians :  indigestion 
(usually  associated  with  nervousness),  27;  rheumatism,  5; 
colds,  8 ;  tuberculosis,  4 ;  constipation,  14 ;  poor  circulation,  3 ; 


The  Book  of  the  Body  173 

headaches,  5 ;  anaemia,  3 ;  scrofula,  1 ;  bronchial  trouble,  5 ; 
syphilis,  1 ;  liver  trouble,  5 ;  general  debility,  5 ;  chills  and 
fever,  1 ;  blood  poisoning,  1 ;  ulcerated  leg,  1 ;  neurasthenia,  6 ; 
locomotor  ataxia,  1 ;  sciatica,  1 ;  asthma,  2 ;  excess  of  uric 
acid,  1 ;  epilepsy,  1 ;  pleurisy,  1 ;  impaction  of  bowels,  1 ; 
pczema,  2 ;  catarrh,  6 ;  appendicitis,  3 ;  valvular  disease  of 
heart,  1 ;  insomnia,  1 ;  gas  poisoning,  1 ;  grippe,  1 ;  cancer,  1." 

There  are  many  diseases  with  many  causes,  and  some 
yield  more  quickly  than  others  to  the  fast.  In  the  first  group 
I  put  the  diseases  of  the  digestive  and  alimentary  tract. 
Stomach  and  bowel  troubles,  and  the  nervous  disorders  oc- 
casioned by  tTiese,  stop  almost  immediately  when  you  fast. 
Next  come  disorders  of  the  blood-stream,  which  are  gen- 
erally a  second  stage  of  digestive  troubles.  Everything  im- 
mediately due  to  impurities  of  the  blood,  pimples,  boils,  and 
ulcers,  inflammation,  badly  healing  wounds,  etc.,  respond  to 
a  few  days  of  fasting  as  to  the  magic  touch  of  the  old-time 
legends.  When  it  comes  to  diseases  caused  by  germ  infec- 
tions, you  have  a  double  aspect  of  the  problem,  and  must  have 
a  double  method  of  attack.  I  would  not  like  to  say  that 
fasting  could  cure  such  a  disease  as  sleeping  sickness,  to  the 
germs  of  which  our  systems  are  not  accustomed,  and  against 
which  they  may  well  be  helpless.  On  the  other  hand,  in 
the  case  of  common  infections,  such  as  colds  and  sore  throats, 
the  fast  is  again  the  touch  of  magic.  Having  been  plagued 
a  great  deal  by  these  ailments  in  past  times,  I  am  accustomed 
to  say  that  I  would  not  trade  my  knowledge  of  fasting  for 
everything  else  that  I  know  about  health. 

The  first  thing  you  must  do  if  you  want  to  take  a  fast  is 
to  read  the  literature  on  the  subject  and  make  up  your  mind 
that  the  experiment  will  do  you  no  injury.  You  should  also 
try  to  get  your  relatives  to  make  up  their  minds,  because 
you  are  nervous  when  you  are  fasting,  and  cannot  withstand 
the  attacks  of  the  people  around  you,  who  will  go  into  a 
panic  and  throw  you  into  a  panic.  As  I  said  before,  it  is 
quite  possible  for  people  to  die  of  panic,  but  I  do  not  be- 
lieve that  anybody  ever  died  of  a  fast.  I  have  known  of 
two  or  three  cases  of  people  dying  while  they  were  fasting, 
but  I  feel  quite  certain  that  the  fast  did  not  cause  their  death ; 
they  would  have  died  anyhow.  You  must  bear  in  mind  that 
among  the  people  who  try  the  fast,  a  great  many  are  in  a 
desperate  condition;  some  have  been  given  up  by  the  doctors. 


174  JMiND  AND  Body 

and  if  now  and  then  one  of  these  should  die,  we  may  surely 
say  that  they  died  in  spite  of  the  fast,  and  not  because  of  it. 
There  is  no  physician  who  can  save  every  patient,  and  it 
•would  be  absurd  to  expect  this,  I  have  read  scores  of  letters 
from  people  who  were  at  the  point  of  death  from  such  "fatal" 
diseases  as  Bright's  disease,  sclerosis  of  the  liver,  and  fatty 
degeneration  of  the  heart,  and  were  literally  snatched  out  of 
the  jaws  of  death  by  beginning  a  fast,  I  would  not  like  to 
guess  just  what  percentage  of  dying  people  in  our  hospitals 
might  be  saved  if  the  doctors  would  withdraw  all  food  from 
them,  but  I  await  with  interest  the  time  when  medical  science 
will  have  the  intelligence  to  try  that  simple  experiment  and 
report  the  results. 

Just  the  other  day  in  the  Los  Angeles  county  jail,  a 
chiropractor  went  on  hunger  strike,  as  a  protest  against  im- 
prisonment, and  he  fasted  41  days,  Then  he  broke  his  fast, 
the  reason  being  given  that  his  pulse  was  down  to  54,  and  he 
was  afraid  of  dying.  I  smiled  to  myself.  The  normal  pulse 
is  70,  I  have  taken  my  pulse  many  times  at  the  end  of  a 
ten-day  fast,  and  it  has  been  as  low  as  32,  and  I  am  not 
dead  yet,  and  if  I  wait  to  die  from  the  symptoms  of  a  fast, 
I  expect  to  live  a  long  time  indeed! 

The  first  time  I  fasted,  I  felt  very  weak,  and  lay  around 
and  hardly  cared  to  lift  my  head;  if  I  walked  from  my  bed 
to  the  lawn,  I  was  tired  in  the  legs.  But  since  then  I  have 
grown  used  to  fasting.  I  have  fasted  for  a  week  probably 
twenty  or  thirty  times,  and  on  such  occasions  I  have  gone 
about  my  business  as  if  nothing  were  happening.  Of  course 
1  would  not  try  to  play  tennis,  or  to  climb  a  mountain,  but 
it  is  a  fact  that  on  the  seventh  day  of  a  fast  in  New  York, 
I  climbed  the  five  or  six  flights  of  stairs  to  the  top  of  the 
Metropolitan  Opera  House,  and  felt  no  ill  effects  from  doing 
this,  I  climbed  slowly,  and  was  careful  not  to  tire  myself. 
The  simple  rule  is  not  to  have  anything  that  you  must  do 
on  the  fast,  and  then  do  what  you  feel  like  doing.  Lie  down 
and  rest,  and  read  a  book,  and  take  as  much  exercise  as 
you  find  you  enjoy.  Keep  your  mind  quiet  and  free  from 
worries,  and  lock  out  of  the  house  everybody  who  tells  you 
that  your  heart  is  going  to  stop  beating  in  the  next  few 
minutes,  and  that  you  must  have  an  injection  of  strychnine 
to  start  it,  and  some  beefsteak  and  fried  onions  to  "restore 
your  strength."     Give  yourself  up  to  the  care  of  your  wiso 


The  Book  of  the  Body  175 

old  mother  nature,  who  will  attend  to  your  heart  just  as 
securely  and  serenely  as  she  attended  to  it  in  the  days  before 
you  were  born. 

By  fasting  I  mean  that  you  take  no  food  whatever.  I 
know  some  nature  cure  teachers  who  practice  what  they  call 
a  "fruit  fast."  All  I  know  is  that  if  I  eat  nothing  but  fruit, 
I  soon  have  my  stomach  boiling  with  fermentation,  and  also 
1  suffer  with  hunger;  whereas,  if  I  take  a  complete  fast,  I 
promptly  forget  all  about  food.  You  must  drink  all  the 
water  you  can  on  the  fast.  This  helps  nature  with  her  house- 
cleaning;  it  is  well  to  drink  a  glass  of  water  every  half  hour 
at  least.  Do  not  try  to  go  without  water,  and  then  write  me 
that  the  fasting  cure  is  a  failure.  Also  please  do  not  write 
and  ask  me  if  it  will  be  fasting  if  you  take  just  a  little  crackers 
and  milk,  or  some  soup,  or  something  else  that  you  think 
doesn't  count! 

I  recommend  a  dose  of  laxative  to  clean  out  the  system 
at  the  beginning  of  a  fast,  because  the  bowels  are  apt  to 
become  sluggish  at  once,  and  the  quicker  you  get  the  sys- 
tem cleansed,  the  better.  It  does  no  good  to  take  laxatives 
if  you  are  going  to  pile  in  more  food,  but  if  ^-ou  are  going 
to  fast,  that  is  a  different  matter.  You  should  take  a  full 
warm  enema  every  day  during  the  fast,  so  long  as  it  brings 
any  results.  There  are  some  people  whose  bowels  are  so 
frightfully  clogged  that  I  have  known  the  enema  to  bring 
results  even  in  the  second  and  third  weeks.  On  the  other 
hand,  if  there  is  no  solid  matter  to  be  removed,  a  small 
enema  every  day  will  suffice.  Take  a  warm  bath  every  day; 
and  needless  to  say,  you  should  get  all  the  fresh  air  you  can, 
and  should  sleep  as  much  as  you  can.  You  may  have  dif- 
ficulty in  sleeping,  because  the  fast  is  apt  to  make  you  nervous 
and  wakeful.  I  have  known  people  who  could  not  fast  be- 
cause they  could  not  sleep,  and  I  have  taught  them  a  little 
trick,  to  put  a  hot  water  bottle  at  the  feet,  and  another  on 
the  abdomen,  to  draw  the  blood  away  from  the  head.  So  they 
would  quickly  fall  asleep,  and  they  got  g^eat  benefit  from 
their  fasts. 

You  should  supply  yourself  with  good  music  if  you  can, 
and  with  plenty  of  good  reading  matter.  You  will  be  amazed 
to  find  how  active  your  mind  becomes;  perhaps  you  had 
never  known  before  what  a  mind  you  had.  Your  blood  has 
always  been  so  clogged  with  food  poisons  that  you  didn't 


176  Mind  and  Body 

know  you  could  think.  My  three  act  play,  "The  Nature 
Woman,"  was  conceived  and  written  in  two  days  and  a  half 
on  a  fast;  but  I  do  not  recommend  this  kind  of  thing — on 
the  contrary,  I  strongly  urge  against  it,  because  if  you  work 
your  brain  on  a  fast,  you  do  not  get  the  good  from  your 
fast,  and  do  not  recover  so  quickly.  Put  off  all  your  problems 
until  you  have  got  your  health  back,  and  seek  only  to  divert 
your  mind  while  fasting. 


CHAPTER   XXVI 
BREAKING  THE  FAST 

(Discusses  various  methods  of  building  up  the  body  after  a 
fast,  especially  the  milk  diet) 

There  remains,  the  question  of  how  to  break  the  fast, 
and  this  is  the  most  important  part  of  the  problem.  You 
may  undo  all  the  good  of  your  fast  by  breaking  it  wrong,  and 
you  are  a  thousand  times  as  apt  to  kill  yourself  then,  as  while 
you  are  fasting.  When  your  hunger  comes  back,  it  comes 
back  with  a  rush,  and  some  people  have  not  the  will  power 
to  control  it. 

I  do  not  advocate  a  complete  fast  in  any  case  except  of 
serious  chronic  disease,  and  then  only  under  the  advice  of 
someone  with  experience;  but  I  advocate  a  short  fast  of  a 
week  or  ten  days  for  almost  every  common  ailment,  and  I 
know  that  such  a  fast  will  help,  even  where  it  may  not  com- 
pletely cure.  You  may  go  on  fasting  so  long  as  you  are 
quiet  and  happy;  but  when  you  find  you  are  becoming  too 
weak  for  comfort,  or  for  the  peace  of  mind  of  your  family 
physician  and  your  friends,  you  may  break  your  fast,  and 
show  them  that  it  is  possible  to  restore  your  strength  and 
body  weight,  and  then  they  won't  bother  so  much  when  you 
try  it  again!  Take  nothing  but  liquid  foods  in  the  break- 
ing of  a  fast;  I  recommend  the  juices  of  fruits  and  toma- 
toes, also  meat  broths.  If  you  have  fasted  a  week  or  two, 
take  a  quarter  of  a  glass;  if  you  have  fasted  a  month,  take 
a  tablespoonful,  and  wait  and  see  what  the  results  are.  Re- 
member that  your  whole  alimentary  tract  is  out  of  action, 
and  give  it  a  chance  to  start  up  slowly.  Take  small  quan- 
tities of  liquid  food  every  two  hours  for  the  first  day.  Then 
you  can  begin  taking  larger  quantities,  and  on  the  next  day 
you  can  try  some  milk,  or  a  soft  poached  egg,  or  the  pulp 
of  cooked  apples  or  prunes.  Do  not  take  any  solid  food 
until  you  are  quite  sure  you  can  digest  it,  and  then  take  only 
a  very  little.  Do  not  take  any  starchy  food  tintil  the  third 
day. 

I  have  known  people  to  break  these  rules.     I  knew  a 

177 


178  Mind  and  Body 

man  who  broke  his  fast  on  hamburg  steak,  and  had  to  be 
helped  out  with  a  stomach  pump.  Once  I  broke  a  week's 
fast  with  a  plate  of  rich  soup,  because  I  was  at  a  friend's 
house  and  there  was  nothing  else,  and  I  yielded  to  the  claims 
of  hospitality,  and  made  myself  ill  and  had  to  fast  for  sev- 
eral days  longer. 

The  easiest  way  to  break  a  fast  is  upon  a  milk  diet.  I 
have  seen  hundreds  of  people  take  this  diet,  and  very  few 
who  did  not  get  benefit.  The  first  time  I  fasted,  which  was 
twelve  days,  I  lost  17  pounds,  and  I  took  the  milk  diet  for 
24  days  thereafter,  and  gained  32  pounds.  I  took  it  at  Mac- 
Fadden's  Sanitarium,  where  I  had  every  attention.  Since 
then,  I  have  many  times  tried  to  take  a  milk  diet  by  myself, 
but  have  never  been  able  to  get  it  to  agree  with  me.  I  do 
not  know  how  to  explain  this  fact;  I  state  it,  to  show  how 
hard  it  is  to  lay  down  general  rules.  On  the  milk  diet  you 
take  into  your  system  two  or  three  times  as  much  food  as 
you  can  assimilate,  and  this  is  a  violation  of  all  my  diet 
rules;  but  it  appears  that  the  bacteria  which  thrive  in  milk 
produce  lactic  acid,  which  is  not  harmful  to  the  system, 
and  if  you  do  not  take  other  foods  you  may  safely  keep  the 
system  flooded  with  milk. 

After  a  fast  you  should  begin  with  small  quantities  of 
milk,  and  by  the  third  day  you  may  be  taking  a  full  glass  of 
warm  milk  every  half  hour  or  every  twenty  minutes,  until 
you  have  taken  seven  or  eight  quarts  per  day.  It  is  better 
to  take  it  warm,  but  sometimes  people  take  it  just  as  well 
without  warming.  Dr.  Porter,  who  has  a  book  on  the  milk 
diet,  insists  upon  complete  rest,  and  makes  his  patients  stay 
in  bed.  MacFadden,  on  the  other  hand,  recommends  gym- 
nastics in  the  morning  before  the  milk,  and  during  the  after- 
noon he  recommends  a  rest  from  the  milk  for  a  couple  of 
hours,  followed  by  abdominal  exercises  to  keep  the  bowels 
open.  This  is  very  important  during  a  fast,  because  you 
are  taking  great  quantities  of  material  into  your  system  and 
it  must  not  be  permitted  to  clog.  Therefore  take  an  enema 
daily,  if  necessary  to  a  free  movement.  Also  take  a  warm 
bath  daily.  Take  the  juice  of  oranges  and  lemons  if  you 
crave  them. 

Upon  one  thing  everyone  who  has  had  experience  with 
the  milk  diet  agrees,  and  that  is  the  necessity  of  absolute 


The  Book  of  the  Body  179 

mental  rest.  If  you  become  excited,  or  nervous,  or  angry 
on  a  milk  diet,  you  may  turn  all  the  contents  of  your  stomach 
into  hard  curds,  and  may  put  yourself  into  convulsions.  The 
wonderful  thing  about  the  milk  diet  is  the  state  of  physical 
and  mental  bliss  it  makes  possible.  It  is  the  ideal  way  of 
breaking  a  fast,  because  it  leaves  you  no  chance  to  get  hun- 
gry; you  have  all  the  food  you  want,  and  your  system  is 
bathed  in  happiness,  a  sense  of  peace  and  well-being  which 
is  truly  marvelous  and  not  to  be  described.  You  gain  any- 
where from  half  a  pound  to  two  pounds  a  day,  and  you  feel 
that  you  have  never  before  in  your  life  known  what  perfect 
health  could  be.  The  fast  sets  you  a  new  standard,  you 
discover  how  nature  meant  you  to  enjoy  life,  and  never  again 
are  you  content  with  that  kind  of  half  existence  with  which 
you  managed  to  worry  along  before  you  discovered  this 
remedy. 

But  let  me  hasten  to  add  that  I  do  not  recommend  the 
fast  as  a  regular  habit  of  life.  The  fast  is  an  emergency 
measure,  to  enable  the  body  to  cleanse  itself  and  to  cure 
disease.  When  you  have  got  your  body  clean  and  free  from 
disease,  it  is  your  business  to  keep  it  that  way,  and  you 
should  apply  your  reason  to  the  problem  of  how  to  live  so 
that  you  will  not  have  to  fast.  If  you  find  that  you  con- 
tinue to  have  ailments,  then  you  must  be  eating  wrongly,  or 
overworking,  or  committing  some  other  offense  against  nature-; 
either  that,  or  else  you  must  have  some  organic  trouble — a. 
bone  in  your  spine  out  of  place,  as  the  osteopaths  tell  you, 
or  your  eyes  out  of  focus,  or  your  appendix  twisted  and 
infected.  I  do  not  claim  that  the  fasting  cure  will  supplant  the 
surgeons  and  the  oculists  and  the  dentists.  It  will  not  mend 
your  bones  if  you  break  them,  and  it  will  not  repair  your 
teeth  that  are  already  decayed;  but  it  will  help  to  keep  your 
teeth  from  decaying  in  the  future,  and  it  will  help  you  to 
prepare  for  a  surgical  operation,  and  to  recover  from  it 
more  quickly.  I  had  to  undergo  an  operation  for  rupture 
a  couple  of  years  ago,  and  I  fasted  for  two  days  before  the 
operation,  and  for  three  days  after  it,  and  I  had  no  particle 
of  nausea  from  the  ether,  and  was  able  to  tend  to  my  mail 
the  day  after  the  operation. 

There  is  one  disease  for  which  I  hesitate  to  recommend 
the  fast,  and  that  is  tuberculosis,  because  I  have  been  told 
of  cases  in  which  the  patient  lost  weight  and  did  not  recover 

13 


180  Mind  and  Body 

it.  However,  in  my  tabulation  of  277  cases,  you  will  note 
four  cases  of  tuberculosis,  and  in  my  book  is  given  a  letter 
from  a  patient  who  claimed  great  benefit.  If  I  had  the 
misfortune  to  contract  tuberculosis,  I  would  take  a  three  or 
four  day  fast,  followed  by  a  milk  diet  for  a  long  period. 
The  milk  diet  is  pleasant  to  take,  and  it  cannot  possibly  do 
any  harm.  If  it  did  not  effect  a  cure,  I  would  try  the  Salis- 
bury treatment — ^that  is,  lean  meat  ground  up  and  medium 
cooked,  and  nothing  else,  except  an  abundance  of  hot  water 
"between  meals.  Prof.  Irving  Fisher  wrote  me  that  there 
is  urgent  need  of  experiment  to  determine  proper  diet  in 
tuberculosis;  and  until  these  experiments  have  been  made, 
we  can  only  grope.  I  am  quite  sure  that  the  "stuffing  system," 
ordinarily  used  by  doctors,  is  a  tragic  mistake. 

In  the  case  of  any  other  disease  whatever,  even  though 
I  might  take  medical  or  surgical  treatment,  I  would  supple- 
ment this  by  a  fast,  because  there  is  no  kind  of  treatment 
which  does  not  succeed  better  with  the  blood  in  good  con- 
dition. In  the  case  of  emergencies,  accidents,  wounds,  etc., 
I  would  rest  assured  that  recovery  would  be  more  prompt 
if  I  were  fasting.  When  David  Graham  Phillips  was  shot, 
I  wrote  a  letter  to  the  New  York  Call,  saying  that  his  doctors 
had  killed  him,  because  they  had  fed  him  while  he  was  lying 
in  a  critical  condition  in  the  hospital.  To  take  nutriment 
into  the  body  under  such  circumstances  is  the  greatest  of 
blunders. 

The  fast  will  help  children,  just  as  it  helps  adults,  only 
they  do  not  need  to  fast  so  long.  It  will  help  the  aged  and 
make  them  feel  young.  (You  need  not  be  afraid  to  fast, 
no  matter  how  old  you  are.)  It  is,  of  course,  an  immediate 
cure  for  fatness,  and  strange  as  it  may  seem,  it  is  also  a 
cure  for  unnatural  thinness.  People  with  ravenous  appetites 
are  just  as  apt  to  be  thin  as  to  be  fat,  because  it  is  not  what 
you  eat  that  builds  up  your  body,  but  only  what  you  assim- 
ilate, and  if  you  eat  too  much,  you  can  make  it  impossible  to 
assimilate  anything  properly.  If  you  take  a  fast  and  break  it 
carefully,  your  body  will  come  to  its  normal  weight,  and  all 
your  functions  to  their  normal  activity. 

A  physician  wrote  me,  taking  me  to  task  for  listing  among 
the  cures  reported  in  my  tabulation  a  case  of  locomotor  ataxia. 
This  disease,  he  explained,  is  caused  because  a  portion  of  a 
nerve  has  been  entirely  destroyed,  and  it  is  a  disease  that  is 


The  Book  of  the  Body  181 

absolutely  and  positively  and  forever  incurable.  I  answered 
that  I  knew  this  to  be  the  teaching  of  present  day  medical 
science,  but  I  invited  him  to  consider  for  a  moment  what 
happens  in  nature.  When  a  crab  loses  a  claw,  we  do  not 
take  it  as  a  matter  of  course  that  the  crab  must  go  about 
with  one  claw  for  the  balance  of  its  life ;  nature  will  make 
that  crab  another  claw.  Man  has  lost  the  power  of  replac- 
ing a  lost  leg,  but  he  stills  retains  the  power  of  replacing 
tissue  which  has  been  cut  away  by  a  surgeon's  knife,  and 
medical  science  takes  this  as  a  matter  of  course.  How  shall 
anybody  say  that  nature  has  forever  lost  the  power  of  re- 
building a  bit  of  nervous  tissue?  How  shall  anyone  say  that 
if  the  blood-stream  is  cleansed  of  poisons,  and  the  energy 
of  the  whole  body  restored,  one  of  the  results  may  not  be 
the  repairing  of  a  broken  nerve  connection?  I  invite  my 
readers  who  have  ailments,  and  especially  I  invite  all  med- 
ical men  among  my  readers,  to  make  a  fair  test  of  the  fast- 
ing cure.  The  results  will  surprise  them,  and  they  will 
quickly  be  forced  to  revise  their  methods  of  treating  illness. 


XXVII 

DISEASES  AND  CURES 

(Discusses  some  of  the  commoner  human  aihuents,  and  what 
is  known  about  their  cause  and  cure.) 

I  begin  with  the  commonest  of  all  troubles,  known  as  a 
"cold."  This  name  implies  that  the  cause  of  the  trouble  lies 
in  exposure  or  chill.  All  the  grandmothers  of  the  world 
are  agreed  about  this.  They  have  a  phrase — or  at  least  they 
had  it  when  I  was  a  boy :  "You  will  catch  your  death." 
Every  time  I  went  out  in  the  rain,  every  time  I  played  with 
wet  feet,  or  sat  in  a  draft,  or  got  under  a  cold  shower,  I 
would  hear  the  formula,  "You  will  catch  your  death." 

And,  on  the  other  hand,  there  are  the  "health  cranks," 
who  declare  vehemently  that  the  name  "cold"  is  a  misnomer 
and  a  trap  for  people's  thoughts.  Cold  has  nothing  to  do 
with  it,  they  say,  and  point  to  arctic  explorers  who  frequently 
get  frozen  to  death,  but  do  not  "catch  cold"  until  they  get 
back  into  the  warm  rooms  of  civilization.  As  for  drafts, 
the  "health  cranks"  aver  that  a  draft  is  merely  "fresh  air 
moving" ;  which  is  supposed  to  settle  the  matter.  However, 
when  you  come  to  think  about  it,  you  realize  that  a  cyclone 
is  likewise  merely  "fresh  air  moving,"  so  you  have  not  decided 
the  question  by  a  phrase. 

While  I  was  writing  these  chapters  on  health  I  contracted 
a  severe  cold — which  was  a  joke  on  me.  The  history  of 
this  cold  is  as  clear  in  my  mind  as  anything  human  can  be, 
and  it  will  serve  for  an  illustration,  showing  how  much  truth 
the  grandmothers  have  on  their  side,  and  how  much  the 
"health  cranks"  have. 

To  begin  with,  I  had  been  overworking.  All  sorts  of 
appeals  come  to  me ;  hundreds  of  people  write  me  letters,  and 
I  cannot  bear  to  leave  them  unanswered.  I  accepted  calls  to 
speak,  and  invitations  where  I  had  to  eat  a  lot  of  stuff  of 
which  my  reason  disapproves ;  so  one  morning  I  woke  up 
with  a  slight  sore  throat.  I  fasted  all  day,  and  by  evening 
'felt  all  right.  But  there  came  another  call,  and  I  consented 
to  take  a  long  automobile  ride  on  a  cold  and  rainy  night,  and 

182 


The  Book  of  the  Body  183 

when  I  got  back  home,  after  five  or  six  hours,  I  was  thor- 
oughly chilled,  and  my  "cold"  came  on  during  the  night. 

This  explanation  will,  I  imagine,  be  satisfactory  to  all 
the  grandmothers  of  the  world.  All  the  dear,  good  grand- 
mothers know  that  an  automobile  ride  on  a  cold,  rainy  night 
is  enough  to  give  any  man  "his  death."  But  listen,  grand- 
mothers! I  have  lain  out  watching  for  deer  all  night  in  the 
late  fall,  with  only  a  thin  blanket  to  cover  me,  and  gotten  up 
so  stiff  with  cold  that  I  could  hardly  move;  yet  I  did  not 
"catch  cold."  When  I  was  a  youth,  I  have  ridden  a  bicycle 
twenty  miles  to  the  beach  in  April,  with  snow  on  the  ground, 
and  plunged  into  the  surf  and  swam,  and  then  ridden  home 
again.  I  have  bathed  in  the  sea  when  I  had  to  run  a  quarter 
of  a  mile  in  a  bathing  suit  along  a  frost-covered  pier,  and 
with  an  icy  wind  blowing  through  my  bones ;  yet  I  never 
took  cold  from  that,  and  never  got  anything  but  a  feeling  of 
exhilaration.  So  it  must  be  that  there  is  some  reason  why 
exposure  causes  colds  at  one  time  and  not  at  another. 

The  explanation  takes  you  over  to  the  "health  cranks." 
They  understand  that  your  blood-stream  must  be  clogged, 
your  bodily  tone  reduced  by  bad  air  and  lack  of  exercise, 
and  more  especially  by  over-eating,  or  by  an  improperly  bal- 
anced diet.  But  then  most  of  them  go  to  extremes^  and  in- 
sist that  the  automobile  ride  and  the  chilled  condition  of  my 
body  had  nothing  to  do  with  my  cold.  But  I  know  other- 
wise— I  have  watched  the  thing  happen  so  often.  In  times 
when  I  was  run  down,  the  slightest  exposure  would  cause 
me  a  cold,  literally  in  a  few  minutes.  I  have  got  myself  a 
sore  throat  going  out  to  the  wood-pile  on  a  winter  day  with 
nothing  on  my  head.  I  have  got  a  cold  by  sitting  still  with 
wet  feet,  or  by  sitting  in  a  draft  on  a  warm  summer  day, 
when  I  had  been  perspiring  a  little.  How  to  explain  this 
I  am  not  sure,  but  my  guess  is  that  you  drive  the  blood 
away  from  the  surface  of  the  body  at  a  time  when  it  is  weak- 
ened and  exposed  to  infection,  and  you  drive  away  the  army 
of  the  white  corpuscles,  and  give  the  battlefield  of  your  body 
to  the  germs. 

I  know  there  are  nature  curists  who  argue  that  germs 
have  nothing  to  do  with  disease;  but  they  have  never  been 
able  to  convince  me — ^germs  are  too  real,  and  too  many,  and 
too  easy  to  watch.  If  you  leave  a  piece  of  meat  exposed  to 
the  air  in  warm  temperature,  the  germs  in  the  air  will  settle 

14 


184  Mind  and  Body 

upon  it  and  begin  to  feed  upon  it  and  to  multiply;  the  meat, 
being  dead,  is  powerless  to  protect  itself.  But  your  nose 
and  throat  are  also  meat,  and  just  as  good  food  for  the 
germs.  The  only  difference  is  that  this  meat  is  alive,  there 
is  a  living  blood-stream  circulating  through  it,  and  several 
score  billions  of  the  body's  own  kind  of  germs,  the  blood 
corpuscles.  If  these  blood  corpuscles  are  sound  and  properly 
nourished,  and  are  brought  to  the  place  of  infection,  they 
are  able  to  destroy  all  the  common  germs;  so  it  is  that  you 
do  not  have  diseases,  but  instead  have  health.  But  your  health 
always  implies  a  struggle  of  your  organism  against  other 
organisms,  and  it  is  the  business  of  your  reason  to  watch 
your  body  and  give  all  the  help  you  can  in  protecting  it. 
Coughs  and  colds,  sore  throats  and  headaches,  are  the  first 
warnings  that  your  defenses  are  being  weakened.  As  a  rule 
these  ailments  are  not  serious  in  themselves,  but  they  are 
signs  of  a  wrong  condition,  and  if  you  neglect  this  condi- 
tion, pretty  soon  you  will  find  that  you  have  to  deal  with 
something  deadly. 

My  cure  for  a  cold  is  to  take  an  enema  and  a  laxative, 
eat  nothing  for  twenty-four  hours,  and  drink  plenty  of  water. 
If  you  have  a  severe  cold  or  sore  throat,  you  will  be  wise  to 
lie  in  bed  for  a  day  or  two,  by  an  open  window.  You  may 
also  use  sprays  and  gargles  if  you  wish,  but  you  will  find 
them  of  little  use,  because  the  germs  are  deep  in  your  mucous 
membranes,  and  cannot  all  be  reached  from  the  outside.  In 
the  old  sad  days  of  my  ignorance  I  would  get  a  cold,  and  go 
to  the  doctor,  and  have  my  throat  and  nose  pumped  full  of 
black  and  green  and  yellow  and  purple  liquids,  which  did 
me  absolutely  no  good  whatever;  the  cold  would  stay  on  for 
two  or  three  weeks,  sometimes  for  eight  or  ten  weeks,  and 
I  would  be  miserable,  utterly  desperate.  I  was  dying  by 
inches,  and  not  one  of  the  doctors  could  tell  me  why. 

The  next  most  common  ailment  is  a  headache,  and  this 
means  poisons  in  your  blood-stream.  It  may  be  from  im- 
proper diet,  from  alcohol,  or  drugs,  or  bad  air,  or  nervous 
excitement.  If  it  is  none  of  these  things,  then  you  should 
begin  to  look  for  some  organic  difficulty,  eye-strain,  for 
example,  or  perhaps  defects  in  the  spine.  The  osteopaths 
and  the  chiropractors  specialize  on  the  spine,  and  have  made 
important  discoveries.  Their  doctrine  is,  in  brief,  that  the 
nervous  force  which  directs  the  blood-stream  is  carried  to 


The  Book  of  the  Body  185 

the  organs  of  the  body  by  nerves  which  leave  the  spinal  cord 
through  openings  between  the  vertebrae.  If  any  of  these 
openings  are  pinched,  you  have  a  diminished  nerve  supply, 
which  means  ill-health  in  that  part  of  the  body  to  which 
the  nerve  leads.  That  such  trouble  can  be  corrected  by 
straightening  the  bones  of  the  spine,  seems  perfectly  reason- 
able; but  like  most  people  with  a  new  idea,  the  discoverers 
proceed  to  carry  it  to  absurd  extremes.  I  have  before  me 
an  official  chiropractic  pamphlet  which  states  that  vertebral 
displacement  is  "the  physical  and  perpetuating  cause  of  ninety- 
five  per  cent  of  all  cases  of  disease;  the  remaining  five  per 
cent  being  due  to  subluxations  of  other  skeletal  segments." 
Naturally  people  who  believe  this  will  devote  nearly  all  their 
study  to  the  bones  and  the  nervous  system.  But  surely,  there 
are  other  parts  of  your  body  which  are  necessary  besides 
bones  and  nerves!  And  what  if  some  of  these  parts  happen 
to  be  malformed  or  defective?  What  if  your  eyes  do  not 
focus  properly,  and  you  are  continually  wearing  out  the 
optic  nerve,  thus  giving  yourself  headaches  and  neurasthenia? 
What  if  you  have  an  appendix  that  has  been  twisted  and 
malformed  from  birth,  and  is  a  center  of  infection  so  long 
as  it  remains  in  the  body? 

Several  years  ago  I  had  an  experience  with  the  appendix, 
from  which  I  learned  something  about  one  of  the  commonest 
of  human  ailments,  constipation,  or  sluggishness  of  the  bowels. 
This  is  a  cause  of  innumerable  chronic  ailments  grouped  under 
the  head  of  auto-intoxication,  or  the  poisoning  of  the  body  by 
the  absorption  into  the  system  of  the  products  of  fermentation 
and  decay  in  the  bowels.  The  bowels  should  move  freely 
two  or  three  times  every  day,  and  the  movements  should  be 
soft.  I  suffered  from  constipation  for  some  twenty  years, 
and  tried,  I  think,  every  remedy  known  both  to  science  and 
to  crankdom.  In  the  beginning  the  doctors  gave  me  drugs 
which  by  irritating  the  intestinal  walls  cause  them  to  pour 
out  quantities  of  water,  and  hurry  the  irritating  substances 
down  the  intestinal  tract.  That  is  all  right  for  an  emergency ; 
if  you  have  swallowed  a  poison,  or  food  which  is  spoiled,  or 
if  you  have  overeaten  and  are  ill,  get  your  system  cleaned 
out  by  any  and  every  device.  But  if  you  habitually  swallow 
mild  poisons,  which  is  what  all  laxatives  are,  you  weaken  the 
intestinal  tract,  and  you  have  to  take  more  and  more  of  these 
poisons,  and  you  get  less  results.    We  may  set  down  as  posi- 


186  Mind  and  Body 

tive  the  statement  that  drugs  are  not  a  remedy  for  constipation. 

Next  comes  diet.  Eat  the  rough  and  bulky  foods,  say 
the  nature  curists,  and  stimulate  the  intestinal  walls  to  activ- 
ity. I  tried  that.  I  listened  to  the  extreme  enthusiasts, 
and  boiled  whole  wheat  and  ate  it,  and  consumed  quantities 
of  bran  biscuit,  and  of  a  Japanese  seaweed  which  Dr. 
Kellogg  prepares,  and  of  petroleum  oil,  and  even  the  skins 
of  oranges,  which  are  most  uncomfortable  eating,  I  assure 
you.  I  would  eat  things  like  this  until  I  got  myself  a  case 
of  diarrhea — and  so  was  cured  of  constipation  for  a  time! 
Strange  as  it  may  seem  to  you,  there  are  even  people  who 
tell  you  to  eat  sand.    I  listened  to  them,  and  ate  many  quarts. 

Then  there  is  exercise.  MacFadden  taught  me  a  whole 
series  of  exercises  for  developing  the  muscles  of  the  abdom- 
inal walls  and  the  back,  which  are  greatly  neglected  by 
civilized  man.  The  fundamental  cause  of  constipation  is  a 
sluggish  life,  and  to  exercise  our  bodies  is  a  duty ;  but  to  me 
it  was  always  an  agony  of  boredom  to  lie  on  a  bed  and  wiggle 
my  abdomen  for  a  quarter  of  an  hour.  The  same  thing 
applies  to  hot  water  treatments, .  which  are  effective,  but  a 
nuisance  and  a  waste  of  time.  I  never  could  keep  them  up 
except  when  I  was  in  trouble. 

Three  or  four  years  ago  I  began  to  notice  a  continual 
irritating  pain  in  my  right  side,  which  I  quickly  realized  must 
lie  in  the  appendix.  I  tried  massage,  and  hot  and  cold  water 
treatments,  and  my  favorite  remedy,  a  week's  fast.  The  pain 
disappeared,  but  it  returned,  so  finally  I  decided,  to  the  dis- 
may of  my  physical  culture  friends,  to  have  the  appendix 
out.  For  years  I  had  been  reading  the  statements  of  nature 
curists,  that  the  appendix  is  an  important  and  vital  part  of 
the  body,  which  pours  an  oil  or  something  into  the  intes- 
tinal tract,  and  so  helps  to  prevent  constipation.  Well,  evi- 
dently my  appendix  wasn't  doing  its  job,  so  I  took  it  to 
a  good  surgeon.  What  I  found  was  that  it  had  been  twisted 
and  malformed  from  birth,  so  that  it  was  a  center  of  con- 
tinous  infection.  From  the  time  I  had  that  operation,  I  have 
never  had  to  think  about  the  subject  of  constipation.  This 
experience  suggests  to  me  how  easy  it  is  for  people  to  make 
statements  about  health  which  have  no  relationship  to  facts. 

I  do  not  recommend  promiscuous  surgery,  and  I  perfectly 
well  realize  that  if  human  beings  would  take  proper  care  of 
their  health,  the  great  proportion  of  surgical  operations  would 


The  Book  of  the  Body  187 

be  unnecessary.  I  realize,  also,  that  surgeons  get  paid  by 
the  job,  and  therefore  have  a  money  interest  in  operating, 
and  it  is  perfectly  futile  to  expect  that  none  of  them  will 
ever  be  influenced  by  the  profit  motive.  Nevertheless,  it  is 
true  that  sometimes  surgical  operations  are  necessary,  and 
that  by  standing  a  little  temporary  inconvenience  you  can 
save  yourself  a  life-time  of  discomfort. 

Take,  for  example,  rupture.  The  human  body  has  here 
a  natural  weakness,  from  which  there  results  a  dangerous 
and  uncomfortable  affliction.  Hundreds  of  thousands  of  men 
are  going  around  all  their  lives  wearing  elaborate  and  ex- 
pensive trusses  which  are  almost,  if  not  entirely  useless,  and 
trying  advertised  "cures"  which  are  entirely  fakes.  An  op- 
eration takes  an  hour  or  two,  and  two  or  three  weeks  in  bed, 
and  when  our  government  drafted  its  young  men  into  the 
army  and  found  that  fourteen  in  every  thousand  of  them 
had  rupture,  it  shipped  them  into  the  hospitals  wholesale  and 
sewed  them  up.  It  happens  that  rupture  affords  one  case 
where  scar  tissue  is  stronger  than  natural  tissue,  and  there 
were  practically  no  returns  from  the  great  number  of  army 
cases. 

Likewise  you  find  extreme  statements  repeated  concern- 
ing the  evils  of  vaccination;  but  if  you  will  read  Parkman's 
"History  of  the  Jesuits  in  North  America,"  you  will  see 
the  horrible  conditions  under  which  the  Indians  lived  in  the 
United  States — noble  savages,  you  understand,  entirely  un- 
contaminated  by  civilized  white  men,  and  whole  populations 
regularly  wiped  out  every  few  years  by  epidemics  of  small- 
pox. That  these  epidemics  ceased  was  due  to  the  discovery 
that  by  infecting  the  body  with  a  mild  form  of  the  disease, 
it  could  be  made  to  develop  substances  which  render  it  im- 
mune to  the  deadly  form.  Here  in  California  we  have  a 
law  which  makes  vaccination  for  school  children  optional, 
and  so  we  may  some  day  have  another  epidemic  to  test  the 
theories  of  the  anti-vaccinationists. 

I  know,  of  course,  the  dreadful  stories  of  people  who 
have  been  given  syphilis  and  other  diseases  by  impure  vac- 
cines. I  don't  know  whether  such  stories  are  true;  but  I 
do  know  that  people  who  live  in  houses  are  sometimes  killed 
by  earthquakes  and  by  lightning,  yet  we  do  not  cease  to 
live  in  houses  because  of  this  chance.  It  seems  to  me  that 
the  remedy  for  such  vaccination  evils  is  not  to  abolish  vac- 


188  Mind  and  Body" 

cination,  but  to  take  more  care  in  the  manufacture  of  our 
vaccines. 

This  danger  is  removed  by  using  vaccines  which  are  sterile, 
and  are  made  especially  for  each  person.  Germs  are  taken 
from  the  sick  person,  and  injected  into  an  animal.  The 
body  of  the  animal  develops  with  great  rapidity  the  "anti- 
bodies" necessary  to  resistance  to  the  germs;  and  as  these 
"anti-bodies"  are  chemical  products,  not  affected  by  heat, 
we  can  take  a  serum  from  the  animal,  sterilize  it,  and  then 
inject  it  into  the  system  of  the  patient,  thus  increasing  re- 
sistance to  the  disease.  I  admit  that  the  best  way  to  increase 
such  resistance  is  to  take  care  of  your  health;  but  some- 
times we  confront  an  emergency,  and  must  use  emergency 
remedies.  We  have  serums  that  really  cure  diphtheria  and 
meningitis,  and  one  that  will  prevent  lock-jaw;  anyone  who 
has  ever  seen  with  his  own  eyes  how  the  deadly  membranes 
of  diphtheria  melt  away  as  a  result  of  an  injection,  will  be 
less  dogmatic  about  the  efforts  of  science  to  combat  disease. 

Of  course  it  is  much  pleasanter  if  you  can  destroy  the 
source  of  the  disease,  and  keep  it  from  getting  into  the  human 
body.  Every  few  years  the  southern  part  of  our  country 
used  to  be  devastated  by  yellow  fever  epidemics.  Every  kind 
of  weird  and  fantastic  remedy  was  tried;  people  would  go 
around  with  sponges  full  of  vinegar  hung  under  their  noses; 
they  would  burn  the  clothing  and  bedding  of  those  who  died 
of  the  disease;  they  would  wear  gloves  when  they  went  shop- 
ping, so  as  not  to  touch  the  money  with  their  hands.  But  at 
last  medical  experimenters  traced  the  disease  to  a  certain 
kind  of  mosquito,  and  now,  if  we  drain  the  swamps  and 
screen  our  houses  and  stay  in  doors  after  sundown,  we  do 
not  get  yellow  fever,  nor  malaria  either.  In  the  same  way, 
if  we  keep  our  bodies  clean  with  soap  and  hot  water,  we 
do  not  get  bitten  by  lice,  and  so  do  not  die  of  typhus.  If  we 
take  pains  with  our  drains  and  water  supply,  so  that  human 
excrement  does  not  get  into  it,  and  if  we  destroy  the  filth-car- 
rying housefly,  we  do  not  have  epidemics  of  typhoid. 

But  under  conditions  of  battle  it  is  not  possible  for  men 
to  take  these  precautions,  and  so  when  they  go  into  the  army 
they  get  a  dose  of  typhoid  serum.  And  this  illustrates  the 
difference  between  a  true  or  hygienic  remedy  for  disease, 
and  a  temporary  or  emergency  remedy.  If  you  say  that 
you  want  to  abolish  war,  and  with  it  the  need  for  typhoid 


The  Book  of  the  Body  189 

vaccination,  I  cheerfully  agree  with  you  in  this.  All  that 
I  am  trying  to  do  is  to  point  out  the  folly  of  flying  to 
extremes,  and  rejecting  any  remedy  which  may  help.  What 
is  the  use  of  making  the  flat  statement  that  vaccinations  and 
serums  never  aid  in  the  cure  of  disease,  when  any  man  can 
see  with  his  own  eyes  the  proof  that  they  do?  In  the  Span- 
ish war,  before  typhoid  vaccination,  many  times  more  soldiers 
died  of  this  disease  than  died  of  bullets;  but  in  the  late  war 
there  was  practically  no  typhoid  at  all  in  the  army  camps. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  was  noticed  that  the  men  who  had  just 
come  in,  and  who  therefore  had  just  been  vaccinated,  were 
considerably  more  susceptible  to  influenza;  which  shows  that 
vaccination  does  reduce  the  body  condition  for  a  time.  The 
reader  may  say  that  in  this  case  I  am  trying  to  sit  on  both 
sides  of  the  fence;  but  the  truth  is  that  I  am  trying  to  keep 
an  open  mind,  and  to  consider  all  the  facts,  and  to  avoid  mak- 
ing rash  statements. 

One  of  the  statements  you  hear  most  frequently  is  that 
drugs  can  never  remedy  disease,  or  help  in  remedying  it. 
Now,  I  abhor  the  drugging  system  of  the  orthodox  medical 
men ;  I  have  talked  with  them,  and  heard  them  talk  with  one 
another,  and  I  know  that  they  will  mix  up  half  a  dozen  different 
substances,  in  the  vague  hope  that  some  one  of  them  will  have 
some  effect.  Even  when  they  know  definitely  the  effects  they 
are  producing,  they  are  in  many  cases  merely  suppressing 
symptoms.  On  the  other  hand,  however,  it  is  a  fact  that 
medical  science  has  had  for  a  generation  or  two  a  specific 
which  destroys  the  germs  of  one  disease  in  the  blood,  without 
at  the  same  time  injuring  the  blood  itself.  That  disease  is 
malaria,  and  the  drug  is  quinine.  Of  course,  the  way  to  avoid 
malaria  is  to  drain  the  swamps ;  but  you  cannot  do  that  all  at 
once,  nor  can  you  always  screen  your  house  and  stay  in  at 
sundown.  When  you  first  go  into  a  country,  you  have  no 
house  to  screen,  and  some  emergency  will  certainly  arise  that 
exposes  you  to  mosquito  bites.  So  you  will  need  quinine,  and 
will  be  foolish  not  to  use  it,  and  know  how  to  use  it. 

Recently  medical  chemists  discovered  another  remedy,  this 
time  for  syphilis.  It  is  called  salvarsan,  and  while  it  does 
not  always  cure,  it  frequently  does.  In  laboratories  today 
men  are  working  over  the  problem  of  constructing  a  com- 
bination of  molecules  which  will  destroy  the  germ  of  sleep- 
ing sickness,  without  at  the  same  time  injuring  the  blood. 


190  Mind  and  Body 

If  they  find  it,  they  will  save  hundreds  of  millions  of  lives.  I 
do  not  see  why  we  cannot  recognize  such  a  possibility,  while  at 
the  same  time  making  use  of  physical  culture,  of  diet  and  fasting. 

When  the  manuscript  of  this  book  was  sent  to  the  printer, 
there  appeared  in  this  place  a  paragraph  telling  of  the  work 
of  Dr.  Albert  Abrams  of  San  Francisco,  in  the  diagnosis  and 
cure  of  disease  by  means  of  radio-active  vibrations.  As  the 
book  is  going  to  press,  the  writer  finds  himself  in  San  Fran- 
cisco, attending  Dr.  Abrams'  clinics ;  and  so  he  finds  it  possible 
to  give  a  more  extended  account  of  some  fascinating  dis- 
coveries, which  seem  destined  to  revolutionize  medical  science. 
If  I  were  to  tell  all  that  I  have  seen  with  my  own  eyes  in 
the  last  twelve  days,  I  fear  the  reader  would  find  his  powers 
of  credulity  overstretched,  so  I  shall  content  myself  with  trying 
to  tell,  in  very  sober  and  cautious  language,  the  theory  upon 
which  Abrams  is  working,  and  the  technic  which  he  has  evolved. 

Modern  science  has  demonstrated  that  all  matter  is  simply 
the  activity  of  electrons,  minute  particles  of  electric  force. 
This  is  a  statement  which  no  present-day  physicist  would  dis- 
pute. The  best  evidence  appears  to  indicate  that  a  molecule 
of  matter  is  a  minute  reproduction  of  the  universe,  a  system 
of  electrons  whirling  about  a  central  nucleus.  No  eye  has 
ever  beheld  an  electron,  for  it  is  billions  of  times  smaller  than 
anything  the  microscope  makes  visible;  but  we  can  see  the 
effects  of  electronic  activity,  and  all  modern  books  of  physics 
give  photographs  of  such.  It  is  possible  to  determine  the 
vibration  rates  of  electrons,  and  to  Dr.  Abrams  occurred  the 
idea  of  determining  the  vibration  rates  of  diseased  tissue  and 
disease  germs.  He  discovered  that  it  was  invariably  the  same ; 
not  merely  does  all  cancerous  material,  for  example,  yield 
the  same  rate,  but  the  blood  of  a  person  suffering  from  cancer 
yields  that  rate,  at  all  times  and  under  all  circumstances.  The 
vibration  of  cancer,  of  tuberculosis,  of  syphilis — each  is  dif- 
ferent, uniform  and  invariable.  Likewise  in  the  blood  are 
other  vibrations,  uniform  and  dependable,  which  reveal  the 
sex  and  age  of  the  patient,  the  virulence  of  the  disease  and 
the  period  of  its  duration — ^yes,  and  even  the  location  in  the 
body,  if  there  be  some  definite  infected  area.  So  here  is  a 
modern  miracle,  an  infallible  device  for  the  diagnosis  of 
disease.  Dr.  Abrams  does  not  have  to  see  the  patient;  all 
he  has  to  have  is  a  drop  of  blood  on  a  piece  of  white  blotting 
paper,  and  he  sits  in  his  laboratory  and  tells  all  about  it. 


The  Book  of  the  Body  191 

and  somewhere  several  thousand  miles  away — in  Toronto  or 
Boston  or  New  Orleans — a  surgeon  operates  and  finds  what 
he  has  been  told  is  there! 

And  that  is  only  the  beginning  of  the  wonder;  because, 
says  Abrams,  if  you  know  the  vibration  rate  of  the  electrons 
of  germs,  you  can  destroy  those  germs.  It  used  to  be  a 
favorite  trick  of  Caruso  to  tap  a  glass  and  determine  its 
musical  note,  and  then  sing  that  note  at  the  glass  and  shatter 
it  to  bits.  It  is  well  known  that  horses,  trotting  swiftly  on  a 
bridge,  have  sometimes  coincided  in  their  step  with  the  vibra- 
tion of  the  bridge  and  thus  have  broken  it  down.  On  that 
same  principle  this  wizard  of  the  electron  introduces  into 
your  body  radio-activity  of  a  certain  rate — and  shall  I  say  that 
he  cures  cancer  and  syphilis  and  tuberculosis  of  many  years 
standing  in  a  few  treatments?  I  will  not  say  that,  because 
you  would  not  and  could  not  believe  me.  I  will  content 
myself  with  telling  what  my  wife  and  I  have  been  watching, 
twice  a  day  for  the  past  twelve  days. 

The  scene  is  a  laboratory,  with  rows  of  raised  seats  at 
one  side  for  the  physicians  who  attend  the  clinic.  There  is 
a  table,  with  the  instruments  of  measurement,  and  Dr.  Abrams 
sits  beside  it,  and  before  him  stands  a  young  man  stripped 
to  the  waist.  The  doctor  is  tapping  upon  the  abdomen  of 
this  man,  and  listening  to  the  sounds.  You  will  find  this  the 
weirdest  part  of  the  whole  procedure,  for  you  will  naturally 
assume  that  this  young  man  is  being  examined,  and  will  be 
dazed  when  some  one  'explains  that  the  patient  is  in  Toronto 
or  Boston  or  New  Orleans,  and  that  this  young  man's  body 
is  the  instrument  which  the  doctor  uses  in  the  determining 
of  the  vibration  rates  of  the  patient's  blood.  Dr.  Abrams 
tried  numerous  instruments,  but  has  been  able  to  find  nothing 
so  sensitive  to  electronic  activity  as  a  human  body.  He  ex- 
plains to  his  classes  that  the  spinal  cord  is  composed  of  mil- 
lions of  nerve  fibres  of  different  vibration  rates;  hence  a 
certain  rate  communicated  to  the  body,  is  automatically  sorted 
out,  and  appears  on  a  certain  precise  spot  of  the  body  in  the 
form  of  increased  activity,  increased  blood  pressure  in  the 
cells,  and  hence  what  all  physicians  know  as  a  "dull  area," 
which  can  be  discovered  by  what  is  known  as  "percussion,"  a 
tapping  with  a  finger.  To  map  out  these  areas  is  merely  a 
matter  of  long  and  patient  experiment;  and  Abrams  has  been 
studying  this  subject  for  some  twenty  years — he  is  author  of 


192  Mind  and  Body 

a  text-book  on  what  is  known  as  the  "reactions  of  Abrams." 
So  now  he  provides  the  world  with  a  series  of  maps  of  the 
human  body;  and  he  sits  in  front  of  his  "subject,"  and  his 
assistant  places  a  specimen  of  blood  in  a  little  electrically  con- 
nected box,  and  sets  the  rheostat  at  some  vibration  number — 
say  fifty — and  Dr.  Abrams  taps  on  a  certain  square  inch  of 
the  abdomen  of  his  "subject,"  and  announces  the  dread  word 
"cancer."  Then  he  places  the  electrode  on  another  part  of  the 
"subject's"  body,  and  taps  some  more,  and  announces  that  it 
is  cancer  of  the  small  intestine,  left  side ;  some  more  tapping, 
and  he  announces  that  its  intensity  is  twelve  ohms,  which  is 
severe ;  and  pretty  soon  there  is  speeding  a  telegram  to  the  phy- 
sician who  has  sent  this  blood  specimen,  telling  him  these  facts, 
and  prescribing  a  certain  vibration  rate  upon  the  "oscilloclast," 
the  instrument  of  radio-activity  which  Dr.  Abrams  has  devised. 

Now,  you  watch  this  thing  for  an  hour  or  two,  and  you 
say  to  yourself :  "Here  is  either  the  greatest  magician  in  the 
history  of  mankind,  or  else  the  greatest  maniac."  You  may 
have  come  prepared  for  some  kind  of  fraud,  but  you  soon 
dismiss  that,  for  you  realize  that  this  man  is  desperately  in 
earnest  about  what  he  is  doing,  and  so  are  all  the  physicians 
who  watch  him.  So  you  seek  refuge  in  the  thought  that  he 
must  be  deluding  himself  and  them,  perhaps  unconsciously. 
But  you  talk  with  these  men,  and  discover  that  they  have 
come  from  all  over  the  country,  and  always  for  one  reason — 
they  had  sent  blood  specimens  to  Abrams,  and  had  found 
that  he  never  made  a  mistake;  he  told  them  more  from  a 
few  drops  of  the  patient's  blood  than  they  themselves  had 
been  able  to  find  out  from  the  whole  patient.  And  then  into 
the  clinic  come  the  doctor's  own  patients — I  must  have  heard 
sixty  or  eighty  of  them  tell  their  story  and  many  of  them 
have  been  lifted  from  the  grave.  People  ten  years  blind 
from  syphilis  who  can  see;  people  operated  on  several  times 
for  cancer  and  given  up  for  dying;  people  with  tumors  on 
the  brain,  or  with  one  lung  gone  from  tuberculosis.  It  is 
literally  a  fact  that  when  you  have  sat  in  Abrams'  clinic  for 
a  week,  all  disease  loses  its  terrors. 

This,  you  see,  is  really  the  mastery  of  life.  If  we  can 
measure  and  control  the  minute  universe  of  the  electron  and 
the  atom,  we  have  touched  the  ultimate  source  of  our  bodily 
life.  I  might  take  chapters  of  this  book  to  tell  you  of  the 
strange  experiments  I  have  seen  in  this  clinic — showing  you, 
for  instance,  how  these  vibrations  respond  to  thought,  how 


The  Book  of  the  Body  193 

by  denying  to  himself  the  disease  the  patient  can  for  a  few 
moments  cancel  in  his  body  the  activity  of  the  harmful  germs ; 
showing  how  the  reactions  differ  in  the  different  sexes  and  at 
different  ages,  and  how  they  respond  to  different  colors  and 
different  drugs,  Abrams'  method  has  revealed  the  secret  of 
such  efficacy  as  drugs  possess — their  work  is  done  by  their 
radio-activity,  and  not  by  their  chemical  properties.  Also  the 
problem  of  vaccination  has  been  solved — for  Abrams  has  dis- 
covered a  dread  new  disease,  which  is  bovine  syphilis, 
originally  caused  in  cattle  by  human  inoculation,  and  now 
reintroduced  in  the  human  being  by  vaccination,  and  becoming 
the  agent  which  prepares  the  soil  of  the  body  for  such  dis- 
orders as  tuberculosis  and  cancer.  And  it  appears  that  we  can 
all  be  rendered  immune  to  these  diseases,  by  a  few  electronic 
vibrations,  introduced  into  our  bodies  in  childhood ;  so  is  opened 
up  to  our  eyes  a  wonderful  vision  of  a  new  race,  purified  and 
made  fit  for  life.  So  here  at  last  is  science  justified  of  her  op- 
timism, and  our  faith  in  human  destiny  forever  vindicated.  Take 
my  advice,  whoever  you  may  be  that  are  suffering,  and  find  out 
about  this  new  work  and  help  to  make  it  known  to  the  world. 

There  are  many  romances  of  medical  science,  some  of 
them  fascinating  as  murder  mysteries  and  big  game  hunting. 
Turn  to  McMasters'  "History  of  the  People  of  the  United 
States"  and  read  his  account  of  the  terrible  epidemic  of  yellow 
fever  in  Philadelphia  a  hundred  years  ago;  I  have  already 
referred  to  the  weird  and  incredible  things  the  people  did  in 
their  effort  to  ward  off  this  plague — sponges  of  vinegar  under 
their  noses  and  "fever  fires"  burning  in  the  streets;  and  then 
a  mosquito  would  fly  up  and  bite  them,  and  in  a  few  hours 
they  would  be  dead!  Or  what  could  be  stranger  than  the 
tracing  of  the  bubonic  plague,  which  has  cost  literally  billions 
of  human  lives,  to  a  parasite  in  the  blood  of  fleas  which  live 
on  the  bodies  of  rats!  Or  what  could  be  more  unexpected 
than  the  tracing  of  our  rheumatic  aches  and  twinges  to  the 
root  canals  of  the  teeth! 

One  of  the  common  ailments  which  afflict  poor  humanity 
is  rheumatism,  a  cause  of  endless  suffering.  It  was  sup- 
posed to  be  due  to  damp  climate  and  exposure,  and  this 
is  true  to  a  certain  extent,  in  the  same  way  that  colds  are 
due  to  exposure.  But  the  investigators  realized  that  there 
must  be  some  bodily  condition  rendering  one  susceptible,  and 
they  set  to  work  to  trace  this  condition  down.  The  pains 
of  rheumatism  are  caused  by  uric  acid  settling  in  the  joints 


194  Mind  and  Body 

of  the  body.  What  causes  the  uric  acid?  Well,  there  is 
uric  acid  in  red  meat,  so  let  us  forbid  rheumatic  people  to 
eat  it !  But  this  is  overlooking  the  fact  that  the  human  body 
itself  is  a  uric  acid  factory;  and  also  the  fact  that  uric  acid 
taken  into  the  stomach  may  not  remain  uric  acid  by  the 
time  it  gets  to  the  blood-stream.  We  know  that  you  may 
eat  a  great  deal  of  fruit  acid  without  necessarily  making 
acid  blood.  On  the  other  hand,  you  can  make  acid  blood 
by  eating  a  lot  of  sugar!  So  you  see  it  isn't  as  simple  as 
it  sounds. 

Rheumatism  has  been  traced  to  its  lair,  which  is  found 
to  be  the  roots  of  the  teeth.  Here  is  a  part  of  the  body  dif- 
ficult to  get  at,  and  as  a  consequence  of  bad  diet  and  un- 
wholesome ways  of  living,  infections  will  start  there,  and  pus 
sacs  be  formed,  and  the  poisons  absorbed  into  the  blood-stream 
and  distributed  through  the  body.  The  first  thought  is  to 
draw  the  infected  teeth;  but  that  is  a  serious  matter,  be- 
cause you  need  your  teeth  to  chew  your  food.  So  the  dentist 
has  to  go  through  a  complicated  process  of  opening  up  the 
tooth  and  cleaning  out  the  root  canals,  and  treating  the  in- 
fected spots  at  the  roots.  Then  he  has  to  fill  the  tooth  all 
the  way  down  to  the  roots,  leaving  no  place  for  infection 
to  gather.  This,  of  course,  takes  time  and  costs  money,  and 
is  one  more  illustration  of  the  fact  that  there  is  one  health 
law  for  the  rich  and  another  health  law  for  the  poor. 

All  the  time  that  I  write  these  chapters  about  health  I 
feel  guilty.  I  know  that  the  wholesome  food  I  recommend 
costs  money,  and  I  know  that  surgery  and  dentistry  cost 
money — yes,  even  sunlight  and  fresh  air  and  recreation ;  even 
a  fast,  because  you  have  to  rest  while  you  take  it,  and  you 
have  to  have  a  roof  over  your  head,  and  warmth  in  winter 
time,  and  somebody  to  wait  upon  you  when  you  are  weak. 
I  know  that  for  a  great  many  of  the  people  who  read  what 
I  write,  all  these  things  are  impossible  of  attainment ;  I  know 
that  for  the  great  majority  of  the  common  people  the  ben- 
efits of  science  do  not  exist.  Science  discovers  how  to  pre- 
vent disease,  but  the  discoveries  are  not  applied,  because 
the  profit  system  controls  the  world,  and  the  profit  system 
wants  the  labor  of  the  poor,  regardless  of  what  happens  to 
their  health.  If  the  people  fall  ill,  they  are  thrown  upon 
the  scrap  heap,  and  the  profit  system  finds  others  to  take 
their  place. 


The  Book  of  the  Body  195 

Take,  for  example,  tuberculosis.  Tuberculosis  is  a  germ, 
infection,  but  it  practically  never  gets  hold  upon  a  human 
body  except  when  the  body  is  reduced  by  undernourishment 
and  lack  of  fresh  air.  Tuberculosis,  therefore,  is  a  disease 
of  sltmis  and  jails.  It  is  definitely  and  indisputably  a  dis- 
ease of  poverty.  It  could  be  wiped  off  the  face  of  the  earth 
in  a  single  generation;  and  the  same  is  true  of  typhus  and 
typhoid.  There  is  another  whole  host  of  ailments  which 
could  be  wiped  out  by  measures  of  public  hygiene,  plus  edu- 
cation. This  includes  all  the  infant  diseases,  and  the  deadly 
venereal  diseases.  But  the  profit  system  stands  in  the  way; 
and  so,  in  these  closing  paragraphs  of  this  Book  of  the  Body, 
I  say  that  there  is  one  disease  which  is  the  deadliest  of  all, 
and  the  source  of  all  others,  and  that  disease  is  poverty. 

I  know  a  certain  physician  to  the  rich,  who  is  an  honest 
and  conscientious  man.  He  said,  "I  loath  my  work.  I  am 
wasting  my  time.  I  am  called  in  by  these  fat,  over-fed  rich 
people  in  their  leisure  class  hotels,  and  what  am  I  to  say  to 
them?  Shall  I  say  to  them,  'You  are  living  an  abnormal 
life,  and  you  can  never  be  well  until  you  cut  out  root  and 
branch  all  your  habits  of  self  indulgence  which  are  destroy- 
ing vou  ?'  But  no,  I  can't  say  that — ^not  one  time  in  a  thou- 
sand. I  am  expected  to  be  polite  and  serious,  and  to  listen 
to  them  while  they  tell  the  long  tiresome  story  of  their  s)mip-. 
toms,  and  I  have  to  encourage  them,  and  give  them  some 
temporary  device  that  will  remove  some  of  the  symptoms 
of  their  trouble." 

And  what  should  one  say  to  this  honest  physk:ian  ?  Should 
one  tell  him  to  go  and  be  a  physician  to  the  poor?  Would 
he  be  any  happier  there?  He  could  tell  the  poor  the  causes 
of  their  diseases,  and  they  would  listen  patiently — they  are 
trained  to  listen,  and  to  accept  what  they  are  told.  Here 
is  a  girl  living  in  an  inside  bedroom  in  a  tenement,  and  work- 
ing ten  or  eleven  hours  a  day  in  an  unvcntilated  factory,  and 
she  is  ill  with  tuberculosis.  The  physician  tells  her  that  she 
needs  plenty  of  fresh  air  and  rest,  and  a  lot  of  eggs  and 
milk  in  her  diet.  He  tells  her  that,  and  he  knows  that  she 
has  as  much  chance  of  carrying  out  his  orders  as  of  flying 
to  the  moon.  Or  maybe  he  comes  upon  a  typhoid  epidemic, 
and  discovers,  as  happened  to  a  friend  of  mine  in  Chicago, 
that  there  is  defective  plumbing  in  some  houses  owned  by 
the  political  leader  of  the  district.     Or  maybe  it  is  a  case 

14 


196  Mind  and  Body 

of  venereal  disease,  in  a  young  man  who  was  drafted  into 
the  army  and  turned  loose  amid  the  joys  of  Paris.  Maybe 
it  is  just  a  commonplace,  every-day  story  of  a  room  full  cf 
school  children,  22  per  cent  of  them  undernourished,  as  is 
the  case  in  New  York  City,  and  the  parents  out  of  work 
a  part  of  the  time,  and  with  no  possibility  in  their  lives  of 
ever  earning  enough  to  feed  the  children  properly.  When 
you  confront  these  universal  facts  of  our  present  social  order, 
you  realize  that  the  problem  of  disease  is  not  merely  a  prob- 
lem of  the  body,  but  is  a  problem  of  the  mind  as  well;  a 
problem  of  politics  and  religion  and  philosophy,  of  the  whole 
way  of  thinking  of  the  so-called  civilized  world.  A  book  of 
health  which  did  not  point  out  these  facts  would  be,  not  a 
book  of  health,  but  a  book  of  sham. 

But  meantime,  while  we  are  trying  to  change  the  world's 
ideas,  we  have  to  live,  and  we  can  do  our  work  better  if  we 
keep  as  well  as  possible.  I  have  tried  to  point  out  the  way; 
it  is,  as  you  can  see,  a  matter  in  part  of  the  body  and  in  part 
of  the  mind.  All  the  bodily  regime  here  laid  out  has  its  basis 
in  mental  habits;  all  wise  and  wholesome  ways  of  life  can, 
at  the  age  when  our  minds  are  plastic,  be  made  into  "second 
mature" — ^things  which  we  do  automatically,  without  effort  or 
temptation  to  do  otherwise.  This  is  the  real  secret  of  true 
happiness  in  the  conduct  of  our  personal  lives ;  to  acquire  self- 
control,  to  rule  our  desires  and  our  passions,  not  harshly  and 
spasmodically,  but  serenely,  as  one  drives  a  car  which  he  thor- 
oughly understands.  It  is  in  vain  that  we  preach  freedom  to 
men  who  have  not  this  self-mastery ;  as  the  poet  tell  us :  "The 
sensual  and  the  dark  rebel  in  vain,  slaves  of  their  own  com- 
pulsion." And  of  all  the  personal  possessions  which  man  can 
attain  on  this  earth,  the  most  precious  is  the  one  of  a  sound 
mind  controlling  a  sound  body.  I  close  this  book  by  quoting 
some  verses  written  by  Sir  Henry  Wotton  three  hundred  years 
ago,  which  I  have  all  my  life  considered  one  of  the  noblest 
pieces  of  poetry  in  our  heritage: 

THE  CHARACTER  OF  A  HAPPY  LIFE 

How  happy  is  he  born  and  taught 

That  serveth  not  another's  will ; 
Whose  armour  is  his  honest  thought 

And  simple  truth  his  utmost  skill! 


The  Book  of  the  Body  1^ 

Whose  passions  not  his  nlasters  are, 
Whose  soul  is  still  prepared  for  death. 

Not  tied  unto  the  world  with  care 
Of  public  fame,  or  private  breath. 

Who  envies  none  that  chance  doth  raise 

Or  vice;  who  never  understood 
How  deepest  wounds  are  given  by  praise; 

Nor  rules  of  state,  but  rules  of  good: 

Who  hath  his  life  from  rumours  freed, 
Whose  conscience  is  his  strong  retreat; 

Whose  state  can  neither  flatterers  feed, 
Nor  ruin  make  accusers  great: 

Who  God  doth  late  and  early  pray 
More  of  His  grace  than  gifts  to  lend; 

And  entertains  the  harmless  day 
With  a  well-chosen  book  or  friend; 

— This  man  is  freed  from  servile  bands 

Of  hope  to  rise,  or  fear  to  fall; 
Lord  of  hknself,  though  not  of  lands; 

And  having  nothing,  yet  'hath  alL 


INDEX 


Abrams,  Dr 190 

Adultery    33 

Adventist    99 

Agriculture 25 

Alcohol    151 

Anti-bodies    188 

Antinomies   58 

Appendix    186 

Arnold   42 

Arrhenius    101 

Automatic  writing 67 

Bairnsfather  29 

Bathing    162 

Battle  Creek  Sanitarium 118 

Beauchamp  70,  85,  89 

Beethoven   47 

Bergson   17 

Beri-beri    128 

Bible 77 

Bio-chemist    59 

Black  bread 128 

Blood   106 

Body    53,  105 

Booth  68 

Bourne    69 

Bruce   71 

Bury 15 

Caffein  150 

Calories   135 

Candy 137 

Capitalist    , 100 

Carbohydrates   124 

Carbon  monoxide 157 

Children  140,  180 

Chiropractors    174,  184 

Chittenden 136 

Christian  Scientists 5,  65,  105 

Clothing    160 

Coffee  151 

Colds    183 

Commandments    32 

Communist   99 

Complete   fast 172 

Camstock    25 


Conduct    42 

Consciousness    56 

Constipation  185 

Cooking    129,  142 

Crawford    88 

Cyrus   164 

Dandruff  109 

\Dante    77 

Darwin   17,  46 

Dentistry    126,  190 

Determinists     57 

Diet  131 

Diet  Standards 135 

Digestion    145 

Diphtheria 188 

Diseases    107,  117 

Dogs  17 

Draft    182 

Drugs 118,  150,  185,  189 

Dubb    63 

Duncan  102 

Dyspepsia   117 

Eddy 65 

Edison  45,  86 

Einstein   101 

Elberf eld  horses 68 

Evolution   8,  17 

Exercise    163 

Faith    9 

Faith  curists 65 

Fast   cure 171 

Fatness    139 

Fats    124 

Fever    108 

Food    filter 145 

Fourth  dimension 5 

Fireless  cooker 142 

Fireplace  157 

Fisher    136 

Fletcher    119,  145 

Free  thinker 15 

Freud   71 


199 


200 


Index 


Fruit  fast 175 

Frugality  38 

Frying-pan    129 

Furnace 157 

Gargles    184 

Gastronomic  art 148 

Genius  49,  60 

George   18 

Germs 183 

God    22,  50 

Goethe   47 

Golden   rule 51 

Greens    132 

Gymnastic  work 166 

Hair    109 

Hallucinations   75 

Hamlet 48 

Happiness  9 

Harrison   6 

Hats   110 

Headache    122,  150,  184 

Health  cranks 182 

Heart   108 

Houdin    93 

Hugo    48 

Huxley   17,  62 

Hyslop  82 

Iceberg  61 

Infanticide    28 

Instincts    134 

Intelligence  22 

Immortality    79 

Irwin,  Will  86 

James  30,  59,  60 

Jesus 47,  48,  50,  51,  76 

John   Barleycorn 152 

Johnson   58 

Jonson   44 

Kant,  Immanuel..   ..4,  47,  51,  58 

Kellogg,  Doctor 118;  164,  186 

Kilmer,   Joyce 44 

Knowledge   94 

Kropotkia    18,  26 


Langley   74 

Lankester,   Prof.   E.  Ray,...     23 

Laxatives    175,  185 

Leanness    139 

Leonardo 47 

Liebault   64 

Life    3 

Lily  Dale 86,  90 

Lincoln 47 

Locomotor    ataxia 180 

Lodge,  Sir   Oliver 83 

Lodge,  Raymond    87 

London,    jack 153 

Macaulay 39 

MacDowell,  Edward 56 

MacFadden   178,  186 

MacSwiney 170 

Maeterlinck,  Maurice 68 

Malaria    189 

Malthusian  law 25 

Marquesans    113 

Materializations    88 

Matter    8 

Meal-hour  147 

Measurement  of  Intelligence, 

Terman's  95 

Meat  121 

Medical  science 105 

Mesmer   63 

Messina  earthquake 170 

Metaphysics   4 

Metchnikoff    138 

Milk    diet 128 

Moderation  39 

Monism   3 

Morality  21,  31,  34,  50 

Morgan    45 

Mormon    99 

Mozart  68 

Multiple    personality 69 

Mutation   17 

Myers   49 

Nature  21,  24,  29 

Nature  cure 160 

Nature  Woman  176 

Neighbor  50 

Newcomb,  Simon 101 

Newton    47 


Index 


201 


New  York  Times 169 

Nicotine 154 

Nietzsche    17 

Novels   164 

Nutrition  of  Man 136 

Oil  stoves 158 

Opsonins   112 

Optimism    42 

Osteopaths    184 

Ouija    67 

Overeating    134 

Oxygen    156 

Patrick,    Dr 167 

Pavlov   148 

Phantasms    75 

Phillips,  David  Graham 180 

Piper,  Mrs 82 

Play    165 

Poisons    146 

Pork   142 

Porter,    Dr 178 

Positivists  6 

Poverty    194 

Prices  of  food 141 

Prince,  Dr.  Morton 70,  89 

Profits   of   Religion 78,99 

Proteins  125 

Prunes   127 

Psychology  QQ 

Psychotherapy  64 

Puritans 89 

Quackenbos    64 

Quinine    188 

Quixote   48 

Raisins  127 

Raw  food 119 

Read,  Alfred  Baker 28 

Reason  13 

Refined  foods 126 

Relaxation 167 

Religion    82 

Reincarnation 76 

Rest    146 

Revelation  12 

Rheumatism  193 


Rice    128 

Rockefeller     45 

Roosevelt,    Theodore 25,  45 

Rugs  159 

Rupture  187 

Sabbath   99 

Salisbury  120 

Sally    70,  85 

Salt  143 

Meats,   salted 143 

Salts   124 

Salvarsan    189 

Savages   135 

Savage,  Rev.  Minot  J 74 

Schrenck-Notzing    88 

Scurvy   128 

Seneca   98 

Shakespeare   47 

Shelley    45,  48 

Sleep  162 

Sleeping  sickness 113,  173 

Smokers    153 

Socialism 167 

Sophocles    87 

Sore  throat 188 

Spencer   8 

Spinoza    79 

Spirits    82 

Spiritualists  86 

Starch    122,  124 

Stealing  33 

Steam  heat 158 

Stimulant    149 

Stock  Exchange 158 

Stomach 105,  138,  148 

Style  161 

Subconscious   mind 61 

Sunday   code 40 

Sugar  126 

Surgery   186 

Survival    81 

Survival  of  the  fittest 22 

Syndicalism    15 

Syphilis   189 

Tanner,    Dr 169 

Tariff  37 

Tea   161 

Teeth 127,  193 

Telepathy 67,  75 

Theosophists    76 


202 


Index 


Tight   shoes 161 

Tobacc*  153 

Tolstoi  49 

Tonsilitis   107 

Trance   , 63 

Tropism  54 

Tuberculosis  

112,  120,  179,  194,  195 

Twain,  Mark 93 

Typhoid  112,  188,  192 

Uranus  92 

Uric   acid 193 


Vaccination  187,  189 

Vaccines    188 

Vegetarian 121 

Vitamines  127,  142 

Wallace  46 

Wells,  H.  G 22 

Williams,  Dr.  Henry  Smith..  102 

Worth,    Patience. 84 

Yellow  fever 188 

Yogis    90 


W.B.C. 


THE  BOOK  OF  LIFE 


VOLUME  TWO:    LOVE  AND  SOCIETY 


To 

llate  €tmt  ^at^ 

in  acknowledgment  of  her  unceasing  efforts  for  a 
better  world,  and  her  fidelity  to  those 
who  struggle  to  achieve  it 


CONTENTS 

PART  THREE:  THE  BOOK  OP  LOVE 

PAGfi 

Chapter  XXVHI.    The  Reality  of  Marriage    ....      3 
Discusses  the  sex-customs  now  existing  in  the  world, 
and  their  relation  to  the  ideal  of  monogamous  love. 

Chapter  XXIX.    The  Development  of  Marriage    ...      8 
Deals  with  the  sex-relationship,  its  meaning  and  its  his- 
tory, the  stages  of  its  development  in  human  society. 

Chapter  XXX.    Sex  and  Young  America IS 

Discusses  present-day  sex  arrangements,  as  they  affect 
the  future  generation. 

Chapter  XXXI.    Sex  and  the  "Smart  Set" 23 

Portrays  the  moral  customs  of  those  who  set  the  fashion 
in  our  present-day  world. 

Chapter  XXXII.     Sex  and  the  Poor 29 

Discusses  prostitution,  the  extent  of  its  prevalence,  and 
the  diseases  which  result  from  it. 

Chapter  XXXIII.    Sex   and   Nature 33 

Maintains  that  our  sex  disorders  are  not  the  result  of 
natural  or  physical  disharmony. 

Chapter  XXXIV.    Love  and  Economics 36 

Maintains  that  our  sex  disorders  are  of  social  origin,  due 
to  the  displacing  of  love  by  money  as  a  motive  in  mating. 

Chapter  XXXV.    Marriage  and  Money 40 

Discusses  the  causes  of  prostitution,  and  that  higher 
form  of  prostitution  known  as  the  "marriage  of  conven- 
ience." 

Chapter  XXXVI.    Love  versus  Lust 46 

Discusses  the  sex  impulse,  its  use  and  misuse;  when  it 
should  be  followed  and  when  repressed. 

vii 


viii,  Contents 

PAGE 

Chapter  XXXVII.    Celibacy   versus    Chastity    ....    51 
The  ideal  of  the  repression  of  the  sex-impulse,  as  against 
the  ideal  of  its  guidance  and  cultivation. 

Chapter  XXXVIII.    The    Defense   of   Love 55 

Discusses  passionate  love,  its  sanction,  its  place  in  life, 
and  its  preservation  in  marriage. 

Chapter  XXXIX.    Birth    Control 60 

Deals  with  the  prevention  of  conception  as  one  of  the 
greatest  of  man's  discoveries,  releasing  him  from  nature's 
enslavement,  and  placing  the  keys  of  life  in  his  hands. 

Chapter  XL.    Early    Marriage 66 

Discusses  love  marriages,  how  they  can  be  made,  and  the 
duty  of  parents  in  respect  to  them. 

Chapter  XLI.    The    Marriage    Club 71 

Discusses  how  parents  and  elders  may  help  the  young  to 
avoid  unhappy  marriages. 

Chapter  XLII.    Education   for   Marriage 75 

Maintains  that  the  art  of  love  can  be  taught,  and  that 
we  have  the  right  and  the  duty  to  teach  it. 

Chapter  XLIII.    The  Money  Side  of  Marriage    ....    79 
Deals  with  the  practical  side  of  the  life  partnership  of 
matrimony. 

Chapter  XLIV.    The  Defense  of  Monogamy 83 

Discusses  the  permanence  of  love,  and  why  we  should 
endeavor  to  preserve  it. 

Chapter  XLV.    The  Problem  of  Jealousy 89 

Discusses  the  question,  to  what  extent  one  person  may 
hold  another  to  the  pledge  of  love. 

Chapter  XLVI.    The  Problem  of  Divorce 93 

Defends  divorce  as  a  protection  to  monogamous  love,  and 
one  of  the  means  of  preventing  infidelity  and  prostitution. 

Chapter  XLVII.    The  Restriction  of  Divorce    ....    97 
Discusses  the  circumstances  under  which  society  has  the 
right  to  forbid  divorce,  or  to  impose  limitations  upon  it 


Contents  ix 

PART  FOUR:  THE  BOOK  OF  SOCIETY 

PAGE 

Chapter  XL VIII.    The  Ego  and  the  World 103 

Discusses  the  beginning  of  consciousness,  in  the  infant 
and  in  primitive  man,  and  the  problem  of  its  adjustment 
to  life. 

Chapter  XLVIX.    Competition  and  Co-operation    .    .    .  107 
Discusses    the    relation    of    the    adult    to    society,    and 
the  part  which  selfishness  and  unselfishness  play  in  the 
development  of  social  life. 

Chapter  L.    Aristocracy  and   Democracy 115 

Discusses  the  idea  of  superior  classes  and  races,  and 
whether  there  is  a  natural  basis  for  such  a  doctrine. 

Chapter  LI.    Ruling  Classes 119 

Deals  with  authority  in  human  society,  how  it  is  obtained, 
and  what  sanction  it  can  claim. 

Chapter  LII.     The  Process  of  Social  Evolution    .    ,    .  122 
Discusses  the  series  of  changes  through  which  human 
society  has  passed. 

Chapter  LIIL    Industrial  Evolution 126 

Examines  the  process  of  evolution  in  industry  and  the 
stage  which  it  has  so  far  reached. 

Chapter  LIV.     The  Class   Struggle 132 

Discusses  history  as  a  battle-ground  between  ruling  and 
subject  classes,  and  the  method  and  outcome  of  this 
struggle. 

Chapter  LV.    The  Capitalist  System 136 

Shows  how  wealth  is  produced  in  modern  society,  and 
the  effect  of  this  system  upon  the  minds  of  the  workers. 

Chapter  LVI.    The  Capitalist  Process 142 

How  profits  are  made  under  the  present  industrial  sys- 
tem and  what  becomes  of  them. 

Chapter  LVII.     Hard  Times 145 

Explains  why  capitalist  prosperity  is  a  spasmodic  thing, 
and  why  abundant  production  brings  distress  instead  of 
plenty. 


X  Contents 

PAGE 

Chapter  LVIII.    The    Iron    Ring    . 148 

Analyzes  further  the  profit  system,  which  strangles  pro- 
duction, and  makes  true  prosperity  impossible. 

Chapter  LIX.    Foreign  Markets 151 

Considers  the  efforts  of  capitalism  to  save  itself  by  mar- 
keting its  surplus  products  abroad,  and  what  results  from 
these  efforts. 

Chapter  LX.     Capitalist    War 155 

Shows  how  the  competition  for  foreign  markets  leads 
nations  automatically  into  war. 

Chapter  LXI.    The   Possibilities   of   Production    .    .    .  158 
Shows  how  much  wealth  we  could  produce  if  we  tried 
and  how  we  proved  it  when  we  had  to. 

Chapter  LXII.    The  Cost  of  Competition 162 

Discusses  the  losses  of  friction  in  our  productive  ma- 
chine, those  which  are  obvious  and  those  which  are 
hidden. 

Chapter  LXIII.    Socialism  and  Syndicalism 166 

Discusses  the  idea  of  the  management  of  industry  by  the 
state,  and  the  idea  of  its  management  by  the  trade  unions. 

Chapter  LXIV.    Communism   and  Anarchism    ....  170 
Considers  the  idea  of  goods  owned  m  common,  and  the 
idea  of   a   society  without   compulsion,   and  how   these 
ideas  have  fared  in  Russia. 

Chapter  LXV.    Social  Revolution 175 

How  the  great  change  is  coming  in  different  industries, 
and  how  we  may  prepare  to  meet  it. 

Chapter  LXVI.    Confiscation    or    Compensation    .    .    .  179 
Shall   the  workers  buy  out  the   capitalists?     Can   they 
afford  to  do  it,  and  what  will  be  the  price? 

Chapter  LXVII.    Expropriating  the  Expropriators    .    .  183 
Discusses    the   dictatorship    of   the   proletariat,    and    its 
chances  for  success  in  the  United  States. 


Contents  » 

PAOS 

Chapter  LXVIII.    The  Problem  of  the  Land    ....  188 
Discusses  the  land  values  tax  as  a  means  of  social  read- 
justment, and  compares  it  with  other  programs. 

Chapter  LXIX.    The   Control  of   Credit 192 

Deals  with  money,  the  part  it  plays  in  the  restriction  of 
industry,  and  may  play  in  the  freeing  of  industry. 

Chapter  LXX.    The  Control  of  Industry 198 

Discusses  various  programs  for  the  change  from  indus- 
trial autocracy  to  industrial  democracy. 

Chapter  LXXI.    The  New  World 202 

Describes  the  co-operative  commonwealth,  beginning 
with  its  money  aspects;  the  standard  wage  and  its  va- 
riations. 

Chapter  LXXII.    Agricultural    Production 206 

Discusses  the  land  in  the  new  world,  and  how  we  foster 
co-operative  farming  and  co-operative  homes. 

Chapter  LXXIII.    Intellectual   Production 210 

Discusses  scientific,  artistic,  and  religious  activities,  as 
a  superstructure  built  upon  the  foundation  of  the  stan- 
dard wage. 

Chapter  LXXIV.     Mankind  Remade 215 

Discusses  human  nature  and  its  weaknesses,  and  what 
happens  to  these  in  the  new  world. 


PART  THREE 

THE  BOOK  OF  LOVE 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 

THE  REALITY  OF  MARRIAGE 

(Discusses  the  sex-customs  now  existing  in  the  world,  and 
their  relation  to  the  ideal  of  monogamous  love.) 

Just  as  human  beings  through  wrong  religious  beliefs  tor- 
ture one  another,  and  wreck  their  lives  and  happiness;  just 
as  through  wrong  eating  and  other  physical  habits  they  make 
disease  and  misery  for  themselves;  just  so  they  suffer  and 
perish  for  lack  of  the  most  elementary  knowledge  concerning 
the  sex  relationship.  The  difference  is  that  in  the  field  of 
religious  ideas  it  is  now  permissible  to  impart  the  truth  one 
possesses.  If  I  tell  you  there  is  no  devil,  and  that  believing 
this  will  not  cause  you  to  suffer  in  an  eternity  of  sulphur  and 
brimstone,  no  one  will  be  able  to  burn  me  at  the  stake,  even 
though  he  might  like  to  do  so.  If  I  advise  you  that  it  is  not 
harmful  to  eat  beefsteak  on  Friday,  or  to  eat  thoroughly 
cooked  pork  any  day  of  the  week,  neither  the  archbishops 
nor  the  rabbis  nor  the  vegetarians  will  be  able  to  lock  me  in 
a  dungeon.  But  if  I  should  impart  to  you  the  simplest  and 
most  necessary  bit  of  knowledge  concerning  the  facts  of  your 
sex  life — ^things  which  every  man  and  woman  must  know  if 
we  are  to  stop  breeding  imbecility  and  degeneracy  in  the  world 
— ^then  I  should  be  liable,  under  federal  statutes,  to  pay  a  fine 
of  $5,000,  and  to  serve  a  term  of  five  years  in  a  federal  peni- 
tentiary. Scarcely  a  week  passes  that  I  do  not  receive  a  letter 
from  someone  asking  for  information  about  such  matters ;  but 
I  dare  not  answer  the  letters,  because  I  know  there  are  agen- 
cies, maintained  and  paid  by  religious  superstition,  employing 
spies  to  trap  people  into  the  breaking  of  this  law. 

I  shall  tell  you  here  as  much  as  I  am  permitted  to  tell,  in 
the  simplest  language  and  the  most  honest  spirit.  I  believe 
.  that  human  beings  are  meant  to  be  happy  on  this  earth,  and 
to  avoid  misery  and  disease.  I  believe  that  they  are  given  the 
powers  of  intelligence  in  order  to  seek  the  ways  of  happiness, 
and  I  believe  that  it  is  a  worthy  work  to  give  them  the  knowl- 
edge they  need  in  order  to  find  happiness. 

3 


4  Love  and  Society 

At  the  outset  of  this  Book  of  Love  we  are  going  to  examine 
the  existing  facts  of  the  sex  relationships  of  men  and  women 
in  present-day  society.  We  shall  discover  that  amid  all  the 
false  and  dishonest  thinking  of  mankind,  there  is  nowhere 
more  falsity  and  dishonesty  than  here.  The  whole  world  is 
a  gigantic  conspiracy  of  "hush,"  and  the  orthodox  and  respect- 
able of  the  world  are  like  worshippers  of  some  god,  who 
spend  their  day-time  burning  incense  before  the  altar,  and 
in  the  night-time  steal  the  sacred  jewels  and  devour  the  con- 
secrated offerings.  These  worshippers  confront  you  with  the 
question,  do  you  believe  in  marriage;  and  they  make  the 
assumption  that  the  institution  of  marriage  exists,  or  at  some 
time  has  existed  in  the  world.  But  if  you  wish  to  do  any 
sound  thinking  about  this  subject,  you  must  get  one  thing 
clear  at  the  outset;  the  institution  of  marriage  is  an  ideal 
which,  has  been  preached  and  taught,  but  which  has  never 
anywhere,  in  any  society,  at  any  stage  of  human  progress, 
actually  existed  as  the  general  practice  of  mankind.  What 
has  existed  and  still  exists  is  a  very  different  institution, 
which  I  shall  here  describe  as  marriage-plus-prostitution. 

By  this  statement  I  do  not  mean  to  deny  that  there  are 
many  women,  and  a  few  men,  who  have  been  monogamous 
all  their  lives ;  nor  that  there  are  many  couples  living  together 
happily  in  monogamous  marriage.  What  I  mean  is  that,  con- 
sidering society  as  a  whole,  wherever  you  find  the  institution 
of  marriage,  you  also  find,  co-existent  therewith  and  comple- 
mentary thereto,  the  institution  of  prostitution.  Of  this  double 
arrangement  one  part  is  recognized,  and  written  into  the  law; 
the  other  part  is  hidden,  and  prohibited  by  law;  but  those 
who  have  to  do  with  enforcing  the  law  all  know  that  it  exists, 
and  practically  all  of  them  consider  it  inevitable,  and  a  great 
many  derive  income  from  it.  So  I  say:  if  you  believe  in 
marriage-plus-prostitution,  that  is  your  right;  but  if  marriage 
is  what  you  believe  in,  then  your  task  is  to  consider  such 
questions  as  these:  Is  marriage  a  possible  thing?  Can  it  ever 
become  the  sex  arrangement  of  any  society?  What  are  the 
forces  which  have  so  far  prevented  it  from  prevailing,  and 
how  can  these  forces  be  counteracted? 

It  is  my  belief  that  monogamous  love  is  the  most  desirable 
of  human  sex  relationships,  the  most  fruitful  in  happiness  and 
spiritual  development.  The  laws  and  institutions  of  civilized 
society  pretend  to  defend  this  relationship,  but  the  briefest 


The  Book  of  Love  5 

study  of  the  facts  will  convince  anyone  that  these  laws  and 
institutions  are  not  really  meant  to  protect  monogamous  love. 
What  they  are  is  a  device  of  the  property-holding  male  to 
secure  his  property  rights  to  women,  and  more  especially  to 
secure  himself  as  to  the  paternity  of  his  heirs.  In  primitive 
society,  where  land  and  other  sources  of  wealth  were  held 
in  common,  and  sex  monogamy  was  unknown,  there  was  no 
way  to  determine  paternity,  and  no  reason  for  doing  so.  But 
under  the  system  of  private  property  and  class  privilege,  it 
is  necessary  for  some  one  man  to  support  a  child,  if  it  is  to 
be  supported;  and  when  a  man  has  fought  hard,  and  robbed 
hard,  and  traded  hard,  and  acquired  wealth,  he  does  not  want 
to  spend  it  in  maintaining  another  man's  child.  That  he 
should  let  himself  be  fooled  into  doing  so  is  one  of  the  great- 
est humiliations  his  fellowmen  can  imagine.  If  you  read 
Shakespeare's  plays,  and  look  up  the  meaning  of  old  words, 
so  as  to  understand  old  witticisms  and  allusions,  you  will 
discover  that  this  was  the  stock  jest  of  Shakespeare's  time. 

In  order  to  protect  himself  from  such  ridicule,  the  man 
maintained  in  ancient  times  his  right  to  kill  the  faithless  wo- 
man with  cruel  tortures.  He  maintains  today  the  right  to  de- 
prive her  of  her  children,  and  of  all  share  in  his  property,  even 
though  she  may  have  helped  to  earn  it.  But  until  quite  recent 
times,  the  beginning  of  the  revolt  of  women,  there  was  never 
any  corresponding  penalty  for  faithlessness  in  husbands.  Un- 
der the  English  law  today,  the  husband  may  divorce  his  wife 
for  infidelity,  but  the  wife  must  prove  infidelity  plus  cruelty, 
and  the  courts  have  held  thatthe  cruelty  must  consist  in  knock- 
ing her  down.  While  I  was  in  England,  the  highest  court 
rendered  a  decision  that  a  man  who  brought  his  mistress  to 
his  home  and  compelled  his  wife  to  wait  upon  her  was  not 
committing  "cruelty"  in  the  meaning  of  the  English  law. 

This  is  what  is  known  as  the  "double  standard,"  and  the 
double  standard  prevails  everywhere  under  the  system  of 
marriage-plus-prostitution,  and  proves  that  capitalist  "monog- 
amy" is  not  a  spiritual  ideal,  but  a  matter  of  class  privilege. 
It  is  a  breach  of  honor  for  the  ruling  class  male  to  tamper 
with  the  wife  of  his  friend;  it  is  frequently  dangerous  for 
him  to  tamper  with  the  young  females  of  his  own  class ;  but 
it  is  in  general  practice  taken  for  granted  that  the  young 
females  of  lower  classes  are  his  legitimate  prey.  In  England 
a  man  may  have  a  marriage  annulled,  if  he  can  prove  that 

2— May  22. 


6  LoTE  AND  Society 

the  woman  he  married  had  what  is  called  a  "past" ;  but  every- 
body takes  it  for  granted  that  the  man  has  had  a  "past";  it 
is  covered  by  the  polite  phrase,  "sowing  his  wild  oats."  Wher- 
ever among  the  ruling  class  you  find  men  bold  enough  to 
discuss  the  facts  of  the  sex  order  they  have  set  up,  you  find 
the  idea,  expressed  or  implied,  that  this  "wild  oats"  is  a  nec- 
essary and  inevitable  part  of  this  order,  and  that  without 
it  the  order  would  break  down.  The  English  philosopher, 
Lecky,  making  an  elaborate  study  of  morals  through  the  ages, 
speaks  of  the  prostitute  in  the  following  frank  language: 

"Herself  the  supreme  type  of  vice,  she  is  ultimately  the 
most  efficient  guardian  of  virtue.  But  for  her,  the  unchal- 
lenged purity  of  countless  happy  homes  would  be  polluted, 
and  not  a  few  who,  in  the  pride  of  their  untempted  chastity, 
think  of  her  with  an  indignant  shudder,  would  have  known 
the  agony  of  remorse  and  despair.  On  that  one  degraded 
and  ignoble  form  are  concentrated  the  passions  that  might 
have  filled  the  world  with  shame.  She  remains,  while  creeds 
and  civilizations  rise  and  fall,  the  eternal  priestess  of  human- 
ity, blasted  for  the  sins  of  the  people." 

I  invite  you  to  study  these  sentences  and  understand  them 
fully.  Remember  that  they  are  the  opinion  of  the  most  learned 
historian  of  sex  customs  who  has  ever  written  in  English; 
a  man  whose  authority  is  recognized  in  our  schools,  whose 
books  are  in  every  college  library.  William  Edward  Hartpole 
Lecky  is  not  in  any  sense  a  revolutionist ;  he  is  a  conventional 
English  scholar,  an  upholder  of  English  law  and  order  and 
patriotism.  He  is  not  of  my  school  of  thought,  but  of  those 
who  now  own  the  world  and  run  it.  I  quote  him,  because 
he  tells  in  plain  language  what  kind  of  world  they  have  made ; 
I  invite  you  to  study  his  words,  and  then  judge  my  state- 
ment that  the  sex  arrangement  under  which  we  live  in  modem 
society  is  not  monogamous  love,  but  marriage-plus-prostitu- 
tion. 

It  is  my  hope  to  point  the  way  to  a  higher  system.  I 
should  like  to  call  it  marriage;  but  perhaps  it  would  be  more 
precise  to  call  it  marriage-minus-prostitution.  In  working  it 
out,  we  shall  have  to  think  for  ourselves,  and  discard  all 
formulas.  It  is  obvious  that  our  present-day  religious  creeds, 
ethical  ideals,  legal  codes,  and  social  rewards  and  punishments 
have  been  powerless  to  protect  marriage,  or  to  make  it  the 
rule  in  sex  relationships.     So  we  shall  have  to  begin  at  the 


The  Book  of  Love  7 

beginning  and  find  new  reasons  for  monogamous  love,  a  new 
basis  of  marriage  other  than  the  protection  of  private  prop- 
erty. We  shall  have  to  inform  ourselves  as  to  the  fundamen- 
tal purposes  of  sex;  we  shall  have  to  ask  ourselves:  What 
are  the  factors  which  determine  rightness  and  wrongness  in 
the  sex  relationship  ?  What  is  love,  and  what  ought  it  to  be  ? 
These  questions  we  shall  try  to  approach  without  any  fixed 
ideas  whatever.  We  shall  decide  them  by  the  same  tests  that 
we  have  used  in  our  thinking  about  God  and  immortality, 
health  and  disease.  We  shall  ask,  not  what  our  ancestors 
believed,  not  what  God  teaches  us,  not  what  the  law  ordains, 
not  what  is  "respectable,"  nor  yet  what  is  "advanced,"  accord- 
ing to  the  claim  of  modern  sex  revolutionists  and  "free  lovers." 
We  shall  ask  ourselves,  what  are  the  facts.  We  shall  ask, 
what  can  be  made  to  work  in  practice,  what  can  justify  itself 
by  the  tests  of  reason  and  common  sense. 


CHAPTER  XXIX 

THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  MARRIAGE 

(Deals  with  the  sex-relationship,  its  meaning  and  its  history, 
the  stages  of  its  development  in  human  society.) 

What,  in  the  most  elemental  form,  is  sex?  It  is  a  differ- 
ence of  function  which  makes  it  necessary  for  two  organisms 
to  take  part  in  the  reproduction  of  the  species.  The  purpose, 
or  at  any  rate  the  effect,  of  this  sex  difference  is  the  mixing 
of  characteristics  and  qualities.  If  the  sex  relationship  were 
unnecessary  to  reproduction,  variations  might  begin,  and  be 
propagated  and  carried  to  extremes  in  one  line  of  inheritance, 
without  ever  affecting  the  rest  of  the  species.  Very  soon 
there  would  be  no  species,  or  rather  an  infinity  of  them ;  each 
line  of  descent  would  fly  apart,  and  become  a  group  all  by 
itself.  You  have  perhaps  heard  people  comment  on  the  fact 
that  blondes  so  frequently  prefer  brunettes,  and  that  tall  men 
are  apt  to  marry  short  women,  and  vice  versa.  This  is 
perhaps  nature's  way  of  keeping  the  type  uniform,  of  spread- 
ing quali4:ies  widely  and  testing  them  thoroughly.  Nature  is 
continually  trying  out  the  powers  of  every  individual  in  every 
species,  and  by  the  process  of  sexual  selection  she  chooses, 
for  the  reproduction  of  the  species,  the  individuals  which  are 
best  fitted  for  survival.  This,  of  course,  refers  to  nature,  con- 
sidered apart  from  man.  In  human  society,  as  I  shall  presently 
show,  sexual  selection  has  been  distorted,  and  partly  sup- 
pressed. 

Sex  differentiation  and  sexual  selection  exist  almost  uni- 
versally throughout  the  animal  and  vegetable  kingdoms,  every- 
where save  in  the  lowest  forms  of  being.  They  take  strange 
and  startling  forms,  and  like  everything  else  in  nature  mani- 
fest amazing  ingenuity.  People  who  wish  to  prove  this  or 
that  about  human  sex  relations  will  advance  arguments  from 
nature;  but  as  a  matter  of  fact  we  can  learn  nothing  what- 
ever from  nature,  except  her  determination  to  preserve  the 
products  of  her  activity  and  to  keep  them  up  to  standard. 
Sometimes  nature  will  give  the  precedence  in  power,  speed 
and  beauty  to  the  male,  and  sometimes  to  the  female.     She 

8 


The  Book  of  Love  9 

is  perfectly  ruthless,  and  willing  in  the  accomplishment  of 
her  purpose  to  destroy  the  individuals  of  either  sex.  She 
will  content  the  most  rabid  feminist  by  causing  the  female 
spider  to  devour  her  mate  when  his  purpose  has  been  accom- 
plished; or  by  causing  the  male  bee  to  fall  from  his  mating 
in  the  air,  a  disemboweled  shell. 

As  for  man,  he  has  won  his  supremacy  over  nature  by  his 
greater  power  to  combine  in  groups;  by  his  more  intense 
gregarious,  or  herd  instincts,  which  enabled  him  to  fight 
and  destroy  creatures  which  would  have  exterminated  him 
if  he  had  fought  them  alone.  So  in  primitive  society  every- 
where, we  find  that  the  individual  is  subordinated  to  the  group, 
and  the  "folkways"  give  but  little  heed  to  personal  rights. 
Very  thorough  investigations  have  been  made  into  the  life 
of  primitive  man  in  many  parts  of  the  world,  and  the  anthro- 
pologists are  now  arguing  over  the  exact  meaning  of  the  data. 
We  shall  not  here  attempt  to  decide  among  them,  but  rest 
content  with  the  statement  that  communism  and  tribal  owner- 
ship is  a  widespread  social  form  among  primitive  man,  so 
much  so  as  to  suggest  that  it  is  an  early  stage  in  social 
evolution. 

And  this  communism  includes,  not  merely  property,  but 
sex.  In  the  very  earliest  days  there  was  often  no  barrier 
whatever  to  the  sex  relationship;  not  even  between  brothers 
and  sisters,  nor  between  parents  and  children.  In  fact,  we 
find  savages  who  do  not  know  that  the  sex  relationship  has 
anything  to  do  with  procreation.  But  as  knowledge  increases, 
sex  "tabus"  develop,  some  wise,  and  some  foolish.  From 
causes  not  entirely  clear,  but  which  we  discuss  in  Chapter 
XLVIII,  there  gradually  evolves  a  widespread  form  of  sex 
relationship  of  primitive  man,  the  system  of  the  "gens,"  as  it  is 
called.  This  is  the  Latin  word  for  family,  but  it  does  not  mean 
family  in  the  narrow  sense  of  mother  and  father  and  children, 
but  in  the  broad  sense  of  all  those  who  have  blood  relationship, 
however  far  removed — uncles  and  aunts  and  cousins,  as  far 
as  memory  can  trace.  In  primitive  communism  a  man  is  not 
permitted  to  enter  into  the  sex  relationship  with  a  woman 
of  the  same  gens,  but  with  all  the  women  of  some  other  gens. 
It  is  difficult  for  us  to  imagine  a  society  in  which  all  the 
men  named  Jones  would  be  married  to  all  the  women  named 
Smith;  but  that  was  the  way  whole  races  of  mankind  lived 
for  many  thousands  of  years. 


10  Love  and  Society 

In  that  primitive  communist  society,  the  woman  was  gener- 
ally the  equal  of  the  man.  It  is  true  that  she  did  the  drudgery 
of  the  camp,  but  the  man,  on  the  other  hand,  faced  the  hard- 
ships of  battle  and  the  chase  on  land  and  sea.  The  woman  was 
as  big  as  the  man,  and  except  when  handicapped  by  pregnancy, 
as  strong  as  the  man ;  she  was  as  much  respected,  if  not  more 
so.  Her  children  bore  her  name,  and  were  under  her  control, 
and  she  was  accustomed  to  assert  herself  in  all  affairs  of  the 
tribe.  In  Frederick  O'Brien's  "White  Shadows  in  the  South 
''Seas,"  you  may  read  a  comical  story  of  a  journey  this  trav- 
eler made  into  the  interior  of  one  of  the  cannibal  islands. 
Everywhere  he  was  treated  with  courtesy  and  hospitality,  but 
was  embarrassed  by  continual  offers  from  would-be  wives. 
In  one  case  a  powerful  cannibal  lady,  whose  advances  he 
rejected,  picked  him  up  and  proceeded  to  carry  him  off,  and 
he  was  quite  helpless  in  her  grasp ;  he  might  have  been  a 
cannibal  husband  today,  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  interven- 
tion of  his  fellow  travelers. 

The  basis  of  this  sex  equality  under  primitive  communism 
is  easy  to  understand.  All  goods  belonged  to  the  tribe,  and 
were  shared  alike  according  to  need.  Children  were  the  tribe's 
most  precious  possession;  therefore  the  woman  suffered  little 
handicap  from  having  a  child  to  bear  and  feed.  Primitive 
woman  would  bear  her  child  by  the  roadside,  and  pick  it  up 
in  her  arms,  and  continue  her  journey;  and  when  she  needed 
food,  she  did  not  have  to  beg  for  it — if  there  was  food  for 
anyone,  there  was  food  for  her  and  her  child.  She  did  her 
share  of  the  gathering  and  preparing  of  food,  because  that 
was  the  habit  and  law  of  her  being;  she  had  energies,  and 
had  never  heard  of  the  idea  of  not  using  them. 

This  primitive  communism  generally  disappears  as  the  tribe 
progresses.  We  cannot  be  sure  of  all  the  stages  of  its  dis- 
appearance, or  of  the  causes,  but  in  a  general  way  we  can 
say  that  it  gives  way  before  the  spread  of  slavery.  In  the 
beginning  primitive  man  does  not  have  any  slaves,  he  does 
not  have  sufficient  foresight  or  self-restraint  for  that.  When 
he  kills  his  enemies  in  battle,  he  builds  a  fire  and  roasts 
their  flesh  and  eats  them ;  and  those  whom  he  captures  alive, 
he  binds  fast  and  takes  with  him,  to  be  sacrificed  to  his  voodoo 
gods.  But  as  he  comes  to  more  settled  ways  of  living,  and 
as  the  tribe  grows  larger,  it  occurs  to  the  chiefs  in  battle 
that  the  captives  would  be  glad  to  give  their  labor  in  return 


The  Book  of  LfOVE  H 

for  their  lives,  and  that  it  would  be  convenient  to  have  some 
people  to  do  the  hard  and  dirty  work.  So  gradually  there 
comes  to  be  a  class  at  the  bottom  of  society,  and  another  class 
at  the  top.  Those  who  capture  the  slaves  and  keep  them  at 
work  lay  claim  to  the  products  of  their  labor — ^at  first  better 
weapons  and  personal  adornments,  then  separate  homes  for 
the  chiefs  and  priests,  separate  gardens,  separate  flocks  and 
herds,  and — what  more  natural? — separate  women. 

This  process  becomes  complete  when  the  tribe  settles  down 
to  agriculture,  and  the  ruling  classes  take  possession  of  the 
land.  When  once  the  land  is  privately  owned,  classes  are 
fixed,  and  class  distinctions  become  the  most  prominent  fact 
in  society.  And  step  by  step  as  this  happens,  we  see  women 
beaten  down,  from  the  position  of  the  cannibal  lady,  who 
could  ask  for  the  man  she  wanted  and  carry  him  off  by 
force  if  necessary,  to  the  position  of  the  modern  woman, 
who  is  physically  weak,  emotionally  unstable,  economically 
dependent,  and  socially  repressed.  You  may  resent  such 
phrases,  but  all  you  have  to  do  is  to  read  the  laws  of  civilized 
countries,  written  into  the  statute  books  by  men  to  define 
the  rights  and  duties  of  women ;  you  will  see  that  everywhere, 
before  the  recent  feminist  revolt,  women  were  classified  under 
the  law  with  children  and  imbeciles. 

Maternity  imposes  on  woman  a  heavy  burden,  and  before 
the  discovery  of  birth  control,  a  burden  that  is  continuous. 
For  nine  months  she  carries  the  child  in  her  body,  and  then 
for  a  year  or  two  she  carries  it  in  her  arms,  or  on  her  back; 
and  by  that  time  there  is  another  child,  and  this  continues 
until  she  is  broken  down.  Having  this  burden,  she  cannot 
possibly  compete  with  the  unburdened  male  for  the  posses- 
sion of  property.  So  wherever  there  is  economic  com- 
petition; wherever  certain  individuals  or  classes  in  the  tribe 
or  group  are  allowed  to  seize  and  hold  the  land;  wherever 
the  products  of  labor  cease  to  be  the  community  property, 
and  become  private  property,  the  objects  of  economic 
strife;  then  inevitably  and  by  natural  process,  woman  comes 
to  he  placed  among  those  who  cannot  protect  themselves — 
that  is,  among  the  children  and  the  imbeciles  and  the  slaves. 
Of  course,  some  children  are  well  cared  for,  and  so  are  some 
imbeciles,  and  some  slaves,  and  some  women.  But  they  are 
cared  for  as  a  matter  of  favor,  not  as  a  matter  of  their  own 
power.     They  proceed  no  longer  as  the  cannibal  lady,  but 


12  Love  and  Society 

by  adopting  and  cultivating  the  slave  virtues,  by  making 
themselves  agreeable  to  their  masters,  by  flattering  their  mas- 
ters' vanity  and  sensuality — in  other  words  by  exercising  what 
we  are  accustomed  to  call  "feminine  charm." 

From  early  barbaric  society  up  to  the  present  day,  we 
observe  that  there  are  classes  of  women,  just  as  there  are 
classes  of  men.  The  position  of  these  classes  changes  within 
certain  limits,  but  in  broad  outline  the  conditions  are  fixed, 
and  may  be  easily  defined.  There  is,  first  of  all,  the  ruling 
class  woman.  She  must  have  birth ;  she  may  or  may  not 
have  wealth,  according  as  to  whether  the  laws  of  that  society 
or  tribe  permit  her  to  have  possessions  of  her  own,  or  to 
inherit  anything  from  her  parents.  If  she  has  no  wealth, 
then  she  will  need  beauty.  She  is  the  woman  who  is  selected 
by  the  ruling  class  man  to  bear  his  name  and  his  children, 
and  to  have  charge  of  the  household  where  these  children 
are  reared,  and  trained  for  the  inheriting  of  their  father's 
wealth  and  the  carrying  on  of  his  position.  This  confers 
upon  the  ruling  class  woman  great  dignity,  and  makes  her 
a  person  of  responsibility.  She  rules,  not  merely  over  the 
slaves  of  the  household,  but  over  men  of  inferior  social  classes, 
and  in  a  few  cases  an  exceptionally  able  woman  has  become 
a  queen,  and  ruled  over  men  of  her  own  class.  This  ruling 
class  woman  has  been  known  through  all  the  ages  by  a  spe- 
cial name,  and  the  ways  and  customs  regarding  her  have 
been  studied  in  an  entertaining  book,  "The  Lady,"  by  Emily 
James  Putnam. 

Next  in  privilege  and  position  to  the  "lady"  is  the  mistress, 
the  woman  who  is  selected  by  the  ruling  class  man,  not  pri- 
marily to  bear  his  children,  but  to  entertain  and  divert 
him.  She  may,  of  course,  bear  children  also.  In  barbaric 
societies,  and  up  to  quite  recent  times,  the  importance  of  the 
ruling  class  man  was  indicated  by  the  number  of  concubines 
he  had,  and  the  position  of  these  women  was  hardly  inferior 
to  that  of  the  wife  or  queen.  In  the  days  of  the  French 
monarchy,  the  king's  mistress  was  frequently  more  impor- 
tant than  the  queen ;  she  was  a  woman  of  ability,  maintaining 
her  supremacy  in  the  intrigues  of  the  court.  In  ancient 
Greek  society,  the  "hetairae"  were  a  recognized  class,  and 
Aspasia,  the  mistress  of  Pericles,  was  the  most  brilliant  and 
most  conspicuous  woman  in  Athens.  In  modern  France,  the 
position  of  the  mistress  is  recognized  by  the  phrase  "demi- 


The  Book  of  Love  13 

monde,"  or  half-world.  The  American  plutocracy  has  devel- 
oped upon  a  superstructure  of  Puritanism,  and  therefore,  in 
America,  hypocrisy  is  necessary.  But  in  the  great  cities  of 
America,  the  vast  majority  of  the  ruling  class  men  keep  mis- 
tresses before  marriage,  and  a  great  many  keep  them  after- 
wards ;  and  these  mistresses  are  coming  to  be  more  and  more 
openly  flaunted,  and  to  acquire  more  and  more  of  what  is  called 
"social  position."  It  is  possible  now  in  the  "smart  set"  for 
a  lady  to  accept  the  status  of  mistress,  delicately  veiled,  with- 
out losing  caste  thereby,  and  actresses  and  other  free  lance 
women  who  got  their  start  in  life  by  taking  the  position  of 
mistress,  are  coming  more  and  more  to  be  recognized  as 
"ladies,"  and  to  be  received  into  what  are  called  the  "best 
circles." 

There  remains  to  be  considered  the  position  of  the  lower 
class  women.  In  barbarous  society  these  women  were  very 
little  different  from  slaves.  They  had  no  rights  of  their  own, 
except  such  rights  as  their  master  man  chose  to  allow  them 
for  his  own  convenience.  They  were  sold  in  marriage  by 
their  parents,  and  they  went  where  they  were  .sold,  and 
obeyed  their  new  master.  They  became  his  household  drudges, 
and  reserved  their  affections  for  him;  if  they  failed  to  do 
this,  he  stoned  them  to  death,  or  strangled  them  with  a  cord 
and  tied  them  in  a  sack  and  threw  them  into  the  river. 

And,  of  course,  the  rights  of  the  master  man  yielded  to  the 
rights  of  men  of  higher  classes.  The  king  or  nobleman  could 
take  any  woman  he  wished  at  any  time,  and  he  made  laws 
to  this  effect  and  enforced  them.  In  feudal  society  the  lord 
of  the  manor  claimed  the  right  of  the  first  nigltf  with  the 
wives  of  his  serfs ;  this  was  one  of  the  ruling  class  privileges 
which  was  abolished  in  the  French  revolution.  Wherever 
the  French  revolution  did  not  succeed  in  affecting  land  tenure, 
'  the  right  of  the  land  owner  to  prey  upon  his  tenant  girls  con- 
tinues as  a  custom,  even  though  it  is  not  written  in  the  law, 
and  would  be  denied  by  the  hypocritical.  It  prevails  in  Poland, 
as  you  may  discover  by  reading  Sienkewicz's  "Whirlpools"; 
it  prevails  in  England,  as  you  may  discover  from  Hardy's 
'Tess  of  the  d'Urbervilles."  You  will  find  that  it  prevails 
in  every  part  of  the  world  where  women  have  poverty  and 
men  have  wealth  and  prestige,  dress  suits  and  automobiles. 
You  will  find  it  wherever  there  are  leisure  class  hotels,  or 
colleges,  or  other  gatherings  of  ruling  class  yotmg  males.  You 


14  Love  and  Society 

will  find  it  in  the  theatrical  and  moving  picture  worlds.  It 
is  well  understood  in  the  theatrical  world  of  Broadway  that 
the  woman  "star"  in  the  profession  gets  her  start  in  life  by 
becoming  the  mistress  of  a  manager  or  "angel."  In  the  mov- 
ing picture  world  of  Southern  California  it  is  a  recognized 
convention,  known  to  everyone  familiar  with  the  business, 
that  a  young  girl  parts  with  her  virtue  in  exchange  for  an 
important  job. 


CHAPTER  XXX 

SEX  AND  YOUNG  AMERICA 

(Discusses  present-day  sex  arrangements,  as  they  affect  the 
future  generation.) 

Our  first  task  is  to  consider  how  people  actually  behave 
in  the  matter  of  sex — as  distinguished  from  the  way  they 
pretend  to  behave.  The  first  and  most  necessary  step  in  the 
cure  of  any  disease  is  a  correct  diagnosis,  and  in  this  case 
we  have  not  merely  to  make  the  diagnosis,  but  to  prove  it; 
because  the  most  conspicuous  fact  about  our  present  sex- 
arrangements  is  a  mass  of  organized  concealment.  Not  merely 
do  teachers  and  preachers  for  the  most  part  suppress  all  men- 
tion of  these  subjects;  but  the  defenders  of  our  present 
economic  disorder  are  accustomed  to  acclaim  the  private  prop- 
erty regime  as  the  only  basis  of  family  life.  So  long  as  people 
hold  such  an  idea,  there  is  no  use  trying  to  teach  them  any- 
thing on  the  subject.  There  is  no  use  talking  to  them  about 
monogamous  love,  because  all  they  understand  is  hypocrisy. 
In  this  chapter,  therefore,  we  shall  proceed  to  hold  up  the 
mirror  in  front  of  capitalist  morality. 

I  pause  and  consider:  Where  shall  I  begin?  At  the  top 
of  society,  or  at  the  bottom?  With  the  city  or  the  country? 
With  the  old  or  the  young?  I  think  you  care  most  of  all 
about  your  boys  and  girls,  so  I  am  going  to  tell  you  what 
is  happening  to  the  youth  of  America  in  these  days  of  tri- 
umphant reaction. 

I  have  a  son,  about  whom  naturally  I  think  a  great  deal; 
just  now  he  is  a  student  at  one  of  our  state  universities, 
and  he  wrote  me  the  other  day:  "I  went  to  a  dance,  and 
believe  me,  father,  if  you  knew  what  these  modern  dances 
mean,  you  would  write  something  about  them."  I  know 
what  they  mean.  They  have  come  to  us  straight  from  the 
brothels  of  the  Argentine,  among  the  vilest  haunts  of  vice  in 
the  world.  Others  have  come  from  the  jungle,  where  they 
were  natural.  The  poor  creature  of  the  jungle  has  his  sex- 
desire  and  nothing  else;  he  is  not  troubled  with  brains,  he 
does  not  have  a  complicated  social  organism  to  build  up  and 

15 


16  Love  and  Society 

protect,  consequently  he  does  not  need  what  are  called  "mor- 
als." But  we  civilized  people  need  morals,  and  we  are  losing 
them,  and  our  society  is  disintegrating,  going  back  to  the 
howling  and  fighting  and  cannibalism  of  the  jungle. 

Prof.  William  James,  America's  greatest  psychologist,  tells 
us  that  going  through  the  motions  appropriate  to  an  emotion 
automatically  causes  that  emotion  to  be  felt.  If  you  watch 
an  actor  preparing  to  rush  on  the  stage  in  an  emotional  scene, 
you  will  see  him  walking  about,  clenching  his  fists,  stamping 
his  feet,  making  ferocious  faces,  "working  himself  up."  And 
now,  what  do  you  think  is  going  on  in  the  minds  of  young 
men  and  women,  while  with  their  bodies  they  are  going 
through  procedures  which  are  nothing  and  can  be  nothing  but 
imitations  of  sexual  contact? 

The  parents,  it  appears,  are  ignorant  and  unsophisticated, 
and  have  left  it  for  the  children  to  find  out  what  these  dances 
mean.  In  Rhode  Island,  one  of  our  oldest  states,  is  Brown 
College,  chosen  by  New  England's  aristocracy  for  the  educa- 
tion of  its  sons;  and  these  boys  go  to  social  aflfairs  in  the 
best  homes  in  Providence,  and  they  call  them  "petting-parties." 
And  here  is  what  they  write  in  their  college  paper : 

"The  modern  social  bud  drinks,  not  too  much,  often,  but 
■enough.  She  smokes  unguardedly,  swears  considerably,  and 
tells  'dirty'  stories.  All  in  all,  she  is  a  most  frivolous, 
passionate,  sensation-seeking  little  thing." 

This  statement,  published  in  a  college  paper,  causes  a 
scandal,  and  a  newspaper  reporter  goes  to  interview  the  col- 
lege boy  who  edits  the  paper,  and  this  boy  talks.  He  tells 
how  he  met  a  lovely  girl  at  a  dance,  and  his  heart  was  thrilled 
with  the  rapture  of  young  love.  "Frankly,  between  you  and 
me,  I  was  pretty  smitten  with  this  particular  little  lady.  Felt 
about  her,  don't  you  krww,  like  a  real  guy  feels  about  the 
girl  he  could  imagine  himself  married  to.  Thought  she  was 
too  nice  to  touch,  almost;  you  know  the  grave  sort  of  love 
affair  a  man  always  has  once  in  a  lifetime.  Well,  we  walked 
a  bit,  and  I  guess  I  didn't  say  much,  for  a  while.  I  felt 
plenty — respectfully — just  the  same.  And  as  we  turned  the 
corner  of  one  of  the  buildings  here,  she  grasped  my  hand. 
Hers  was  trembling.  'Love  and  let  love  is  my  motto,  dearie,' 
.said  this  seraph  of  my  dreams;  'come,  we're  losing  a  lot  of 
time  getting  started.*  That  girl  thought  I  was  dead  slow.  She 
■didn't  know  that  just  then  I  imagined  the  great  love  of  my 


The  Book  of  Love  17 

life  was  just  entering  the  door.  It  was  cruel  the  way  she 
got  down  from  the  pedestal  I  had  built  for  her." 

Suppose  I  should  ask  you  to  name  the  influence  that  is 
having  most  to  do  with  shaping  the  thoughts  of  young  Amer- 
ica— what  would  you  answer?  Undoubtedly,  the  moving 
pictures.  It  is  from  the  "movies"  that  your  children  learn 
what  life  is;  if  I  can  show  you  that  a  certain  thing  is  in  the 
"movies,"  you  can  surely  not  deny  that  it  is  passing  every 
day  and  night  into  the  hearts  and  minds  of  millions  of  our 
boys  and  girls.  Take  a  vote  among  the  girls,  what  would 
they  consider  the  most  delightful  destiny  in  life;  surely  nine 
out  of  ten  would  answer,  to  become  a  screen  star,  and  pose 
before  a  world  of  admirers,  and  be  paid  a  million  dollars  a 
year.  Make  a  test  and  see;  and  put  that  fact  together  with 
the  one  I  have  already  stated,  that  in  order  to  get  an  impor- 
tant job  in  the  "movies,"  a  girl  must  regularly  and  as  a  mat- 
ter of  course  part  with  her  virtue. 

You  will  be  told,  no  doubt,  that  this  is  a  slanderous  state- 
ment, so  let  me  give  you  a  little  evidence.  I  happened  within 
the  past  year  to  be  in  the  private  office  of  a  well  known  mov- 
ing picture  producer,  a  man  who  is  married,  and  takes  care 
to  tell  you  that  he  loves  his  wife.  He  was  producing  a  play, 
the  heroine  of  which  was  supposed  to  be  a  daughter  of  Puri- 
tan New  England.  To  play  this  part  he  had  engaged  a  chaste 
girl,  and  as  a  result  was  in  the  midst  of  a  queer  trouble, 
which  he  poured  out  to  me.  His  "leading  man"  had  refused 
to  act  with  this  girl,  insisting  that  no  girl  could  act  a  part  of 
love  unless  she  had  had  passionate  experience;  no  such  thing 
had  ever  been  heard  of  in  moving  pictures  before.  Likewise, 
the  director  agreed  that  no  girl  who  is  chaste  could  act  for 
the  screen,  and  the  producer  asked  my  advice  about  it.  Mr. 
William  Allen  White,  of  Kansas,  was  present  in  the  office, 
and  authorizes  me  to  state  that  he  substantiates  this  anecdote. 
We  both  advised  the  producer  to  stand  by  the  girl,  and  he 
did  so;  and  the  picture  went  out,  and  proved  to  be  what  in 
trade  parlance  is  termed  a  "frost" ;  that  is  to  say,  your  children 
didn't  care  for  it,  and  it  cost  the  producer  something  like  a 
hundred  thousand  dollars  to  make  this  attempt  to  defy  the 
conventions  of  the  moving  picture  world. 

I  will  tell  you  another  story.  I  have  a  friend,  a  prom- 
inent man  in  Los  Angeles,  who  was  appealed  to  by  a  young 
lady  who  wished  to  act  in  the  "movies."     My  friend  intro- 


18  Love  and  Society 

duced  this  young  lady  to  a  very  prominent  screen  actor,  who 
in  turn  introduced  her  to  one  of  the  biggest  producers  in 
America,  one  of  the  men  whose  "million  dollar  feature  pic- 
tures" are  regularly  exploited.  The  producer  examined  the 
young  lady's  figure,  and  told  her  that  she  would  "do";  he 
added,  quite  casually,  and  as  a  matter  of  course,  that  she 
would  be  expected  to  "pay  the  price."  The  young  lady 
took  exception  to  this  proposition,  and  gave  up  the  chance. 
She  told  my  friend  about  it,  and  he,  being  a  man  of  the 
world,  accustomed  to  dealing  with  the  foibles  of  his  fellow- 
men,  wrote  a  note  to  the  actor,  explaining  that  inasmuch  as 
this  young  lady  had  been  socially  introduced  to  him,  and  by 
him  socially  introduced  to  the  manager,  she  should  not  have 
been  expected  to  "pay  the  price."  To  this  the  actor  answered 
that  my  friend  was  correct,  and  he  would  see  the  manager 
about  it.  The  manager  conceded  the  point,  and  the  young 
lady  got  her  chance  in  the  "movies"  and  made  good  without 
"paying  the  price."  This  story  tells  you  all  you  need  to 
know  about  the  difference  in  sex  ethics  that  society  applies 
to  the  "lady"  and  to  the  daughter  of  the  common  people. 

You  know,  of  course,  what  is  the  stock  theme  of  all 
moving  pictures — the  virtuous  daughter  of  the  people,  who 
resists  all  temptations,  and  is  finally  rescued  from  her  would- 
be  seducer  by  the  strong  and  sturdy  arm  of  a  male  doll. 
Could  one  ask  a  more  perfect  illustration  of  capitalist  hy- 
pocrisy than  the  fact  that  the  girl  who  plays  this  role  is 
required  to  pay  with  her  virtue  for  the  privilege  of  playing 
it!  And  if  you  know  anything  about  young  girls,  you  can 
watch  her  playing  it  on  the  screen,  and  see  from  her  every 
gesture  that  what  I  am  telling  you  is  true.  My  wife  knows 
young  girls,  and  I  took  her,  the  other  day,  to  see  a  moving 
picture.  She  said:  "I  have  solved  a  problem.  When  I 
come  home  on  the  street-cars,  it  happens  that  I  ride  with  a 
lot  qf  young  girls  from  the  high  school.  I  have  been  watch- 
ing them,  and  I  couldn't  imagine  what  was  the  matter  with 
them.  All  simple,  girlish  straightforwardness  is  gone  out  of 
them;  they  are  making  eyes,  in  the  strangest  manner — and 
at  nobody;  just  practicing,  apparently.  They  wear  yearn- 
ing facial  expressions;  when  they  start  to  walk,  they  do  not 
walk,  but  writhe  and  wiggle.  I  thought  there  must  be  some 
nervous  eye  and  lip  disease  got  abroad  in  the  school. 
But  now,  when  I  go  to  a  moving  picture,  I  discover  what  it 
means.    They  are  imitating  the  'stars'  on  the  screen!" 


The  Book  of  Love  1^ 

In  these  pictures,  you  know,  there  are  "ingenues,"  young 
girls  engaged  in  making  a  happy  ending  to  the  story  by 
capturing  a  rich  lover;  and  then  there  are  "vamps,"  engaged 
in  seducing  young  men,  or  breaking  up  some  happy  home. 
In  old-style  melodrama  it  was  possible  to  tell  the  "ingenue" 
from  the  "vamps";  the  former  would  trip  lightly,  and  glance 
coyly  out  of  the  corners  of  her  eyes,  while  the  "vamp"  moved 
with  slow,  languished  writhing,  blinking  heavy-lidded,  sin- 
ister eyes.  But  now-a-days  the  "vamps"  have  learned  to 
pjose  as  "ingenues,"  and  the  "ingenues"  are  as  vicious  as  the 
"vamps";  they  both  make  the  same  glances,  and  culminate 
in  the  same  sensual  swoon.  It  is  all  sex,  and  nothing  else — 
except  revolvers  and  fighting,  and  wild  rushing  about. 

And  then,  too,  there  are  the  musical  comedies,  made 
wholly  out  of  sex,  being  known  as  "girl  shows,"  or  more 
frankly  still,  "leg  shows."  A  row  of  half  naked  women, 
prancing  and  gyrating  on  the  stage,  and  in  front  of  them 
rows  of  bald-headed  old  men,  gazing  at  them  greedily;  also 
college  boys,  or  boys  too  imbecile  to  get  through  college, 
sending  in  their  cards  with  boxes  of  costly  flowers.  You 
will  be  shocked  as  you  read  my  plain  statements  of  fact,  but 
if  you  are  the  average  American,  you  will  take  your  family 
to  a  musical  show  which  has  come  straight  from  the  brothels 
of  Paris,  every  allusion  of  which  is  obscene.  I  remember 
once  being  in  a  small  town  in  the  South,  when  one  of  these 
"road  shows"  arrived  from  New  York,  and  I  realized  that 
this  institution  was  simply  a  traveling  house  of  ill  fame ;  the 
whole  male  portion  of  the  town  was  a-quiver  with  excite- 
ment, a  mixture  of  lust  and  fear. 

I  live  in  Southern  California,  one  of  many  places  in 
America  where  the  idle  rich  gather  for  their  diversion.  The 
country  is  dotted  with  palatial  hotels,  and  a  golden  flood  of 
pleasure-seekers  come  in  every  winter.  I  have  talked  with 
some  of  the  college  boys  in  this  part  of  the  country,  and 
also  with  teachers  who  try  to  save  the  boys ;  they  report 
these  "swell"  hotels  as  hot-beds  of  vice,  haunted  by  married 
women  with  automobiles,  and  nothing  to  do,  who  wish  to  go 
into  the  canyons  for  sexual  riots.  Even  elderly  women,  white- 
haired  women,  old  enough  to  be  your  grandmother!  I  have 
had  them  pointed  out  to  me  in  these  hotels,  their  cheeks  and 
lips  covered  with  rouge,  with  pink  silk  tights  on  their  calves, 
and  nothing  else  almost  up  to  their  knees  and  nothing  at  all 


20  Love  and  Society 

half  way  down  their  backs.  These  old  women  seek  to  prey 
on  boys,  wanting  their  youth,  and  being  willing  to  lavish 
money  upon  them.  They  are  preying  on  your  boys — you 
prosperous  business  men,  who  have  preached  the  gospel  of 
"each  for  himself,"  and  are  proud  of  your  skill  to  prey  upon 
society.  You  heap  up  your  fortunes,  and  call  it  success,  and 
are  secure  and  happy.  You  have  made  your  children  safe 
against  want,  you  think ;  but  how  are  you  going  to  make  them 
safe  against  the  "vamps"  who  prey  upon  the  overwhelming 
excitements  of  youth,  and  betray  your  sons  before  your  very 
eyes — teaching  them  lust  in  their  youth,  so  that  love  may  never 
be  born  in  their  stunted  hearts?  All  the  haunts  of  "gilded 
vice"  are  thriving,  and  somebody's  boy  is  paying  the  interest 
on  the  capital,  to  say  nothing  of  paying  the  police. 

Many  years  ago  I  paid  a  call  upon  Anthony  Comstock, 
head  of  the  Society  for  the  Prevention  of  Vice.  Comstock 
was  an  old-style  Puritan,  and  many  insist  that  he  was  like- 
wise an  old-style  grafter.  However  that  may  be,  he  had  a 
collection  of  the  literature  of  pornography  which  would  cause 
any  man  to  hesitate  in  condemning  his  activities.  There  is 
a  vast  trafific  in  this  kind  of  thing;  it  is  sold  by  pack-peddlers 
all  over  the  country,  and  it  is  sold  in  little  shops  in  the  neigh- 
borhood of  public  schools.  You  may  be  sure  that  in  your 
school  there  are  some  boys  who  know  where  to  get  it,  even 
though  they  will  not  tell  what  they  know.  I  will  describe 
just  one  piece  that  a  school  boy  brought  to  me,  a  catalogue 
of  obscene  literature,  for  sale  in  Spain,  and  to  be  ordered 
wholesale.  You  know  how  men  with  wares  to  sell  will 
expend  their  imaginations  and  exhaust  their  vocabulary  in 
describing  to  you  the  charms  of  each  particular  article  for 
sale.  Here  was  a  catalogue  of  one  or  two  hundred  pages, 
listing  thousands  of  items,  pictures,  pamphlets  and  books, 
and  various  implements  of  vice,  all  set  forth  in  that  imitation 
ecstasy  of  department  stores  and  seed  catalogues:  here  was 
"something  neat,"  here  was  a  "fancy  one,"  this  one  was 
"a  peach,"  and  that  one  was  "a  winner." 

When  I  was  a  lad,  I  was  tramping  in  the  Adirondack 
mountains  and  was  picked  up  by  an  itinerant  photographer. 
We  rode  all  day  together,  and  he  became  friendly,  and  showed 
me  some  obscene  pictures.  Presently  he  discovered  that  he 
was  dealing  with  a  young  moralist,  and  apparently  it  was 
the  first  time  he  had  ever  had  that  experience;  he  talked 


The  Book  of  Love  21 

honestly,  and  we  became  friends  on  a  different  basis.  This 
man  had  a  wife  and  children  at  home,  but  he  traveled  all 
over  the  mountains,  and  was  like  the  sailor  with  a  girl  in 
every  port.  Also  he  was  thoroughly  familiar  with  all  forms 
of  unnatural  vice,  and  took  this  also  as  a  matter  of  course, 
and  spread  it  on  his  journeys. 

The  other  day  I  read  a  statement  by  a  prominent  phy- 
sician in  New  York;  he  had  been  talking  with  a  police 
captain,  and  had  asked  him  to  state  what  in  his  opinion  was  the 
most  significant  development  in  the  social  life  of  New  York. 
The  answer  was,  "The  spread  of  male  prostitution."  Here 
is  a  subject  to  which  I  have  to  admit  my  courage  is  unequal. 
I  cannot  repeat  the  jokes  which  I  have  heard  young  men  tell 
about  these  matters,  and  about  the  attitude  of  the  police  to 
them.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  these  hideous  forms  of  vice  are 
now  the  commonplace  of  the  under- world  of  all  our  great 
cities.  The  other  day  a  friend  of  mine  was  talking  with 
a  prostitute  who  had  left  a  high-class  resort,  where  the  price 
charged  was  ten  dollars,  and  gone  to  live  in  a  "fifty-cent 
house,"  frequented  by  sailors.  She  was  asked  the  reason,  and 
her  explanation  was,  "The  sailors  are  natural."  Dr.  William 
J.  Robinson  has  written  in  his  magazine  an  account  of  the 
haunts  in  Berlin  which  are  frequented  by  the  victims  of  un- 
natural vice,  there  allowed  to  meet  openly  and  to  solicit. 
Frank  Harris,  in  his  "Life  of  Oscar  Wilde,"  tells  how  when 
that  scandal  was  at  its  height,  and  further  exposure  threatened, 
swarms  of  the  most  prominent  men  in  England  suddenly 
discovered  that  it  was  advisable  for  them  to  travel  on  the 
Continent.  The  great  public  schools  of  England  are  rotten 
with  these  practices;  the  younger  boys  learn  them  from  the 
older  ones,  and  are  victims  all  the  rest  of  their  lives.  And 
the  corruption  is  creeping  through  our  own  social  body — ^and 
you  think  that  all  you  have  to  do  is  not  to  know  about  it ! 

My  friend  Floyd  Dell,  reading  this  manuscript,  insists  that 
this  chapter  and  the  one  following  are  too  severe.  In  case 
others  should  agree  with  him,  I  quote  two  newspaper  items 
which  appear  while  I  am  reading  the  proofs.  The  first  is 
from  an  interview  with  H.  Gordon  Selfridge,  the  London 
merchant,  telling  his  impressions  of  America.  He  tells  about 
the  "flappers,"  and  then  about  the  "shifters." 

"The  other  is  the  newly  exploited  'shifters.'  The  'shifters' 
are  an  organization  of  mushroom  growth  among  high  school 

8 


22  Love  and  Society 

girls  and  boys  which  is  spreading  through  the  eastern  States 
and  winning  converts  among  youngsters.  It  is  described  as 
the  'flapper  Ku  Klux/  and  its  emblem,  if  worn  by  a  girl, 
according  to  high  school  teachers  and  children's  society  leaders 
who  oppose  it,  to  be  nothing  more  nor  less  than  an  invitation 
to  be  kissed. 

"To  call  it  an  organization  even  is  exaggeration,  for  the 
'shifters'  are  better  described  as  a  secret  understanding  with- 
out any  responsible  head. 

"From  being  a  seemingly  harmless  group  whose  emblem 
was  originally  a  brass  paper  clip  fastened  in  the  coat  lapel  it 
has  developed  by  rapid  strides.  Manufacturers  of  emblems 
are  coining  money  by  the  sale  of  hands,  palm  outstretched. 
The  significance  is  take  what  you  want  or,  as  the  motto  of  the 
order  says,  'be  a  good  fellow;  get  something  for  nothing.' 
One  of  the  principles  is  to  'do'  one's  parents,  referred  to  as 
'they.'  " 

The  second  item  is  an  Associated  Press  despatch: 
"ST.  LOUIS,  March  10.— In  reiterating  his  statement 
that  a  girls'  and  a  boys'  secret  organization  requiring  that  all 
applicants  must  have  violated  the  moral  code  before  admission 
was  granted,  existed  in  a  local  high  school,  Victor  J.  Miller, 
president  of  the  Board  of  Police  Commissioners,  tonight  named 
the  Soldan  High  School  as  the  one  in  which  the  alleged 
immoral  conditions  exist.  The  school  is  attended  largely  by 
children  of  the  wealthy  West  End  citizens. 


CHAPTER  XXXI 

SEX  AND  THE  "SMART  SET* 

(Portrays  the  moral  customs  of  those  who  set  the  fashion  in 
our  present-day  world.) 

We  have  discussed  what  is  happening  to  our  young  people ; 
let  us  next  consider  what  our  mature  people  are  doing.  Hav- 
ing mentioned  conditions  in  England,  I  will  give  a  glimpse  of 
London  "high  life"  two  years  before  the  war. 

As  a  visiting  writer,  I  was  invited  to  luncheon  at  the  home 
of  a  woman  novelist,  whose  books  at  that  time  were  widely 
read  both  in  her  country  and  here.  Present  at  the  luncheon 
was  a  prominent  publisher,  who  I  afterwards  learned  was 
the  lady's  lover j  also  the  lady's  grown  and  married  son. 
The  publisher  looked  like  a  buxom  hunting  squire,  but  the 
lady  told  me  that  he  was  very  unhappy,  because  his  wife 
would  not  divorce  him.  The  lady  had  just  come  from  a 
week-end  party  at  the  home  of  an  earl,  who  at  this  moment 
occupies  one  of  the  highest  posts  in  the  gift  of  the  British 
Empire.  Things  had  gone  comically  wrong  at  this  country 
house  party,  she  said,  because  the  hostess  had  failed  to  remem- 
ber that  Lord  So-and-so  was  at  present  living  with  Lady 
Somebody-else.  One  of  the  duties  of  hostesses  at  house  parties, 
it  appears,  is  to  know  who  is  living  with  whom,  in  order 
that  they  may  be  put  in  connecting  rooms.  In  this  case  his 
Lordship  had  been  grouchy,  and  everybody's  pleasure  had 
been  spoiled. 

This  produced  a  discussion  of  the  subject  of  marriage, 
and  the  son  remarked  that  marriage  was  like  an  old  slipper; 
you  wore  it,  because  you  had  got  used  to  it,  but  you  did 
not  talk  about  it,  because  it  was  unimportant  and  stupid.  I 
went  away,  and  happened  to  mention  these  matters  to  a  friend, 
who  had  met  this  woman  novelist  in  Nice.  The  novelist  had 
there,  in  a  group  of  people,  been  introduced  to  a  young  girl 
who  was  suffering  from  neurasthenia.  "My  dear,"  said  the 
novelist,  affectionately,  "what  you  need  is  to  have  an  illegit- 
imate baby." 

This,  you  will  say,  is  the  "old  world,"  and  you  always 

23 


24  LoTE  AND  Society 

knew  that  it  was  corrupt.  If  so,  let  me  tell  you  a  few  things 
that  I  have  seen  among  the  "upper  circles"  of  our  own  great 
and  virtuous  democracy.  My  first  acquaintance  with  New 
York  "society"  came  after  the  publication  of  "The  Jungle." 
As  the  author  of  that  book  I  was  a  sensation,  almost  as  much 
so  as  if  I  had  won  the  heavy-weight  championship  of  the 
world.  Out  of  curiosity  I  accepted  an  invitation  for  a  week- 
end amid  what  is  called  the  "hunting  set"  of  Long  Island. 
Here  was  a  gorgeous  palace  with  many  tapestries,  and  soft- 
footed  servants,  and  decanters  and  cocktails  at  every  stage 
of  one's  journey  about  the  place,  like  coaling  stations  on  the 
trade  routes  of  the  British  Empire.  One  of  the  first  sights 
that  caught  my  young  eye  was  a  large  and  stately  lady  in 
semi-undress,  smoking  a  big  black  cigar.  If  I  were  to  men- 
tion her  name,  every  newspaper  reader  in  America  would 
know  her;  and  before  I  had  been  introduced  to  her,  I  heard 
two  young  men  in  evening  dress  make  an  obscenp  remark 
about  her,  and  what  she  was  waiting  for  that  evening. 

I  discovered  quickly  that,  while  there  was  a  great  deal  of 
sex  among  these  people,  there  was  very  little  love.  There  was 
principally  a  wish  to  score  cleverly  and  subtly  at  the  expense 
of  another  person's  feelings.  It  is  called  the  "srhart  set," 
you  understand,  and  I  will  give  you  an  idea  of  how  "smart'* 
it  is.  I  was  walking  down  a  passage  with  a  lady,  and  on  a 
couch  sat  another  lady,  side  by  side  with  a  certain  very 
famous  lawyer,  whose  golden  eloquence  you  have  probably 
listened  to  from  platforms,  and  whom  for  the  purpose  of  this 
anecdote  I  will  name  Jones.  Mr.  Jones  and  the  lady  on  the 
sofa  were  sitting  very  close  together,  and  my  companion,  with 
a  bright  smile  over  her  shoulder,  called  out:  "Be  careful, 
Mary;  youll  be  scattering  a  lot  of  little  Joneses  around  here 
if  you  don't  watch  out!"  Quite  "continental,"  you  perceive; 
and  a  long  way  from  the  Puritanism  of  our  ancestors! 

From  there  I  went  to  the  billiard-room,  and  observed  a 
young  man  of  fashion  trying  to  play  billiards  when  he  was 
half  drunk.  It  was  a  funny  spectacle,  and  they  took  away 
his  cigarette  by  force,  for  fear  he  would  drop  it  on  the  cloth 
of  the  billiard  table.  Pretty  soon  he  was  telling  about  a  racing 
meet,  and  an  orgy  with  negro  women  in  a  stable.  Therefore 
I  returned  to  where  the  ladies  were  gathered,  and  one  middle- 
aged  matron,  who  had  read  widely,  including  some  of  my 
books,  engaged  me  in  serious  conversation.    I  came  later  on  to 


The  Book  of  Love  25 

know  her  rather  well,  and  she  told  me  her  views  of  love; 
the  source  of  all  the  sex  troubles  of  humanity  was  that  they 
took  the  relationship  seriously.  Modern  discoveries  made  it 
unnecessary  to  attach  importance  to  it.  She  herself,  acting 
upon  this  theory,  probably  had  had  relations  with — my  friends, 
reading  the  proofs  of  this  book,  beg  me  to  omit  the  number 
of  men,  because  you  would  not  believe  me! 

You  may  argue  that  this  is  not  typical;  say  that  I  fell 
into  the  clutches  of  some  particular  group  of  degenerates. 
All  I  can  tell  you  is  that  these  people  are  as  "socially  prom- 
inent" as  any  in  New  York  City.  I  will  say  furthermore  that 
I  have  sat  in  the  home  of  the  best  known  corporation  lawyer 
in  America,  who  was  paid  a  million  dollars  to  organize  the 
steel  trust! — the  late  James  B.  Dill,  at  that  time  a  member 
of  the  Court  of  Appeals  of  New  Jersey — ^and  have  heard  him 
"muck-rake"  his  business  friends  by  the  hour  with  stories  of 
that  sort,  I  have  heard  him  tell  of  the  "steel  crowd"  hiring 
a  trolley  car  and  a  load  of  prostitutes  and  champagne,  and 
taking  an  all-night  trip  from  one  city  to  another,  smashing 
up  both  the  car  and  the  prostitutes.  I  have  heard  him  tell 
of  sitting  on  the  deck  of  a  Sound  steamer,  and  overhearing 
two  of  his  Wall  Street  associates  and  their  wives  arranging 
to  trade  partners  for  the  night. 

I  have  mentioned  a  lady  who  had  a  great  many  lovers. 
Once  in  the  dining-room  of  a  club  on  Fifth  Avenue,  commonly 
known  as  "the  Millionaires',"  a  companion  pointed  out  various 
people,  many  of  whom  I  had  read  about  in  the  newspapers,  and 
told  me  funny  stories  about  them.  "See  that  old  boy  with 
a  note-book,"  said  my  host.  "That  is  Jacob  So-and-so,  and 
he  is  entering  up  the  cost  of  his  lunch.  He  keeps  accounts 
of  everything,  even  of  his  women.  He  told  me  he  had  had 
over  a  thousand,  and  they  had  cost  him  over  a  million." 

,  It  is  impossible  to  say  what  is  the  most  terrible  thing  in 
capitalist  society,  but  among  the  most  terrible  are  assuredly 
the  old  men.  The  richest  and  most  powerful  banker  in  Amer- 
ica was  in  his  sex  habits  the  merry  jest  of  New  York  society. 
He  took  toward  women  the  same  attitude  as  King  Edward 
VH;  if  he  wanted  one,  he  went  up  and  asked  for  her,  and 
it  made  no  difference  who  she  was,  or  where  she  was.  This 
man's  personal  living  expenses  were  five  thousand  dollars  a 
day,  and  all  women  understood  that  they  might  have  anything 
within  reason. 


26  Love  and  Society 

When  I  was  a  boy,  living  in  New  York,  there  was  a  cer- 
tain aged  money-lender  about  whom  one  read  something  in 
the  newspapers  almost  every  day.  He  was  a  prominent  figure, 
because  he  was  worth  eighty  millions,  yet  wore  an  old,  rusty 
black  suit,  and  saved  every  penny.  Every  now  and  then  you 
would  read  in  the  paper  how  some  woman  had  been  arrested 
for  attempting  to  blackmail  him  in  his  office.  It  seemed 
puzzling,  because  you  wouldn't  think  of  him  as  a  likely  sub- 
ject for  blackmail.  Some  years  later  I  met  Dorothy  Richard- 
son, author  of  "The  Long  Day,"  a  very  fine  book  which  has 
been  undeservedly  forgotten.  Miss  Richardson  had  been  a 
reporter  for  the  New  York  Herald,  and  had  been  sent  to 
interview  this  old  money-lender.  She  was  ushered  into  his 
private  office,  and  as  soon  as  the  attendant  had  gone  out  and 
closed  the  door,  the  old  man  came  up,  and  without  a  word 
of  preliminaries  grabbed  her  in  his  arms  like  a  gorilla.  She 
fought  and  scratched,  and  got  out,  and  was  wise  enough  to 
say  nothing  about  it;  therefore  there  was  nothing  published 
about  another  attempt  to  blackmail  the  aged  money-lender! 

What  this  means  is  that  men  of  unlimited  means  live  lives 
of  unbridled  lust,  and  then  in  their  old  age  they  are  helpless 
victims  of  their  own  impulses.  There  was  a  certain  enor- 
mously wealthy  United  States  Senator  from  West  Virginia, 
who  came  very  near  being  Vice  President  of  the  United 
States.  This  doddering  old  man  would  go  about  the  streets 
of  Washington  with  a  couple  of  very  decorous  and  carefully 
trained  attendants;  and  whenever  an  attractive  young  woman 
would  pass  on  the  street,  or  when  one  would  approach  the 
Senator,  these  two  attendants  would  quietly  slip  their  arms 
into  his  and  hold  him  fast.  They  would  do  this  so  that  the 
ordinary  person  would  not  suspect  what  was  going  on,  but 
would  think  the  old  man  was  being  supported. 

You  do  not  have  to  take  these  things  on  my  word;  the 
newspapers  are  full  of  them  all  the  time,  and  they  ar.e  proven 
in  court.  Just  now  as  I  write,  the  president  of  the  most 
powerful  bank  in  America  is  claiming  in  court  that  his  children 
are  not  his  own,  but  that  their  father  is  an  Indian  guide.  His 
wife,  on  the  other  hand,  is  accusing  the  banker  of  having 
played  the  role  of  husband  to  several  other  women.  He 
would  take  these  women  traveling  on  his  yacht,  which,  quaint- 
ly enough,  was  termed  the  "Modesty." 

Also  the  papers  have  been  full  of  the  "Hamon  case." 


The  Book  of  Love  27 

Here  is  a  wealthy  man,  Republican  National  G)mmitteeman 
from  Oklahoma,  who  is  about  to  go  to  Washington  to  advise 
our  new  President  whom  to  appoint  to  office  from  that  state. 
Before  he  goes,  he  casts  off  his  mistress,  and  she  shoots  him. 
She  was  his  secretary,  it  appears,  and  helped  him  to  make 
his  fortune;  she  has  made  many  friends,  and  a  million  dol- 
lars is  spent  to  save  her  life.  The  prosecuting  attorney  calls 
her  a  "painted  snake,"  and  accuses  her  of  having  sat  week 
after  week  "displaying  to  the  jury  twenty-four  inches  of  silk 
stockinged  shin-bone."  The  jury,  apparently  unable  to  with- 
stand this  allurement,  acquits  the  woman,  and  she  announces 
that  she  intends  to  bring  suit  under  the  man's  will  to  get  his 
money!  Also,  she  is  going  into  the  "movies,"  and  tells  us 
that  it  is  to  be  "for  educational  purposes."  Everything  in 
our  capitalist  society  must  be  "educational,"  you  understand. 
It  was  P.  T.  Barnum  who  discovered  that  the  American  people 
would  flock  to  look  at  a  five-legged  calf,  if  it  was  presented 
as  "educational." 

The  moving  pictures  and  the  theatres  are  the  honey-pots 
which  gather  the  feminine  beauty  and  youthful  charm  of  our 
country  for  the  convenience  of  rich  men's  lust.  These  girls 
swarm  in  the  theatrical  agencies,  and  in  the  artists*  studios; 
they  starve  for  a  while,  and  finally  they  yield.  In  every  great 
city  there  are  thousands  of  men  of  wealth,  whose  only  occu- 
pation is  to  prey  upon  such  girls.  I  know  a  certain  theatrical 
manager,  the  most  famous  in  the  United  States,  a  sensual, 
stout  little  Jew.  He  is  a  man  of  culture  and  subtle  insight, 
and  in  the  course  of  his  conversation  he  described  to  me,  quite 
casually  and  as  a  matter  of  course,  the  charm  of  deflowering 
a  virgin.  Nothing  could  equal  that  sensation;  the  first  time 
was  the  last. 

Many  years  ago  there  was  a  horrible  scandal  in  New  York. 
The  most  famous  architect  in  America  was  murdered,  and 
the  newspapers  probed  into  his  life,  and  it  was  revealed  to 
us  that  many  of  the  most  famous  artists  and  men  about  town 
in  New  York  maintained  elaborate  studios,  equipped  with 
every  luxury,  all  the  paraphernalia  of  all  the  vices  of  the 
ages ;  and  through  these  places  there  flowed  an  endless  stream 
of  beautiful  young  girls.  In  every  large  city  in  America  you 
will  find  an  "athletic  club,"  and  if  you  go  there  and  listen  to 
the  gossip,  you  discover  that  there  are  scores  of  idle  rich  men 
with  automobiles  and  private  apartments,  and  a  staff  of  pro- 


28  Love  and  Society 

curers  used  in  preying,  not  merely  upon  young  girls,  but  also 
upon  young  boys.  And  these  are  not  merely  the  children  of 
the  poor,  they  are  the  children  of  all  but  the  rich  and  power- 
ful. In  the  "movies"  you  see  pictures  of  girls  lured  into 
automobiles,  and  carried  out  into  the  country,  or  seduced  by 
means  of  "knock-out  drops,"  and  you  think  this  is  just  "melo- 
drama" ;  but  it  is  happening  all  the  time.  In  every  big  city 
of  our  country  the  police  know  that  hundreds  of  young  girls 
disappear  every  year.  At  a  recent  convention  of  police  chiefs 
in  Washington,  it  was  stated,  from  police  records,  that  sixty 
thousand  girls  disappear  every  year  in  the  United  States, 
leaving  no  trace.  Unless  the  parents  happen  to  be  in  position 
to  make  a  fuss,  not  even  the  names  of  the  girls  are  published 
in  the  newspapers.  I  do  not  ask  you  to  believe  such  things 
on  my  word ;  believe  District  Attorney  Sims  of  Chicago,  who 
made  the  most  thorough  study  of  this  subject  ever  made  in 
America,  and  wrote: 

"When  a  white  slave  is  sold  and  landed  in  a  house  or  dive 
she  becomes  a  prisoner.  ...  In  each  of  these  places  is  a 
room  having  but  one  door,  to  which  the  keeper  holds  the 
key.  Here  are  locked  all  the  street  clothes,  shoes  and  ordinary 
apparel.  .  .  .  The  finery  provided  for  the  girls  is  of  a 
nature  to  make  their  appearance  on  the  street  impossible. 
Then  in  addition  to  this  handicap,  the  girl  is  placed  at  once 
in  debt  to  the  keeper  for  a  wardrobe.  .  .  .  She  cannot 
escape  while  she  is  in  debt,  and  she  can  never  get  out  of 
debt.  Not  many  of  the  women  in  this  class  expect  to  live 
more  than  ten  years — perhaps  the  average  is  less.  Many  die 
painful  deaths  by  disease,  many  by  consumption,  but  it  is 
hardly  beyond  the  truth  to  say  that  suicide  is  their  general 
expectation." 


CHAPTER  XXXII 

SEX  AND  THE  POOR 

(Discusses  prostitution,  the  extent  of  its  prevalence,  and  the 
diseases  which  result  from  it.) 

It  is  manifest  that  the  rich  cannot  indulge  in  vices,  with- 
out drawing  the  poor  after  them;  and  in  addition  to  this, 
the  poor  have  their  own  evil  instincts,  which  fester  in  neglect. 
There  were  several  hundred  thousand  dark  rooms,  that  is  rooms 
without  light  or  ventilation,  in  New  York  City  before  the  war. 
Now  the  country  is  reported  to  be  short  a  million  homes,  and 
in  New  York  City  working  girls  are  sleeping  six  or  eight  in 
a  room.  In  the  homes  of  the  poor  in  the  slums,  parents  and 
children  and  boarders  all  sleep  in  one  room  indiscriminately, 
and  the  world  moves  back  to  that  primitive  communism,  in 
which  incest  is  an  everyday  affair,  and  little  children  learn 
all  the  vices  there  are.  I  have  in  my  hand  a  pamphlet  by  a 
physician,  in  charge  of  a  hospital  in  New  York,  who  in 
fifteen  years  has  examined  nine  hundred  children  who  have 
been  raped,  and  the  age  of  the  youngest  was  eight  months ! 
I  have  another  pamphlet  by  a  settlement  worker,  who  dis- 
cusses the  problem  of  the  thousands  of  deserted  wives,  most 
of  them  with  children,  many  with  children  yet  unborn.  As 
I  write,  there  are  millions  of  men  out  of  work  in  our  cotmtry, 
and  these  men  are  desperate,  and  they  quit  and  take  to  the 
road.  They  join  the  army  of  the  casual  workers,  the  "blanket 
stiffs";  and,  of  course,  the  more  there  are  of  these  men,  the 
more  prostitutes  there  have  to  be,  and  the  more  homosexuality 
there  will  inevitably  be. 

Also  the  girls  are  out  of  work,  and  are  on  the  streets. 
Many  years  ago  I  visited  the  mill  towns  of  New  England, 
"she-towns"  they  are  called,  and  one  of  the  young  fellows 
said  to  me  that  you  could  buy  a  girl  there  for  the  price  of 
a  sandwich.  Read  "The  Long  Day,"  to  which  I  have  pre- 
viously referred,  and  see  how  our  working  girls  live.  Dor- 
othy Richardson  describes  her  room-mate,  who  read  cheap 
novels  which  she  found  in  the  gutter  weeklies.  She  read 
them  over  and  over;  when  she  had  got  to  the  bottom  of  the 

29 


30  Love  and  Society 

pile,  she  began  again,  because  her  mind  was  so  weak  that  she 
had  forgotten  everything.  And  then  one  day  Miss  Richard- 
son happened  to  be  groping  in  a  corner  of  a  closet,  and 
came  upon  a  great  pile  of  bottles,  and  examined  them,  and 
was  made  sick  with  horror — abortion  mixtures. 

Dr.  William  J.  Robinson,  an  authority  on  the  subject, 
estimates  that  there  are  one  million  abortions  in  the  United 
States  every  year.  Some  of  these  are  accidental,  caused  by 
venereal  disease,  but  the  vast  majority  are  deliberate  acts, 
crimes  under  the  law,  murder  of  human  life.  Dr.  Robinson 
also  estimates,  from  the  many  thousands  of  cases  which  come 
to  him,  that  ninety-five  per  cent  of  all  men  have  at  some  time 
practiced  self-abuse.  He  is  a  strenuous  opponent  of  what  he 
calls  "hysteria"  on  the  subject  of  venereal  disease,  and  insists 
that  its  prevalence  is  exaggerated;  that  instead  of  one  person 
in  ten  being  syphilitic,  as  is  commonly  stated,  the  proportion 
is  only  one  in  twenty.  He  insists  that  the  percentage  of  per- 
sons having  had  gonorrhea  is  only  twenty-five  per  cent, 
instead  of  seventy-five  or  eighty-five.  I  find  that  other  author- 
ities generally  agree  in  the  statement  that  fifty  per  cent  of 
young  men  become  infected  with  some  venereal  disease  before 
they  reach  the  age  of  thirty.  The  Committee  of  Seven  in 
New  York  estimated  in  1903  that  there  were  two  hundred 
thousand  cases  of  syphilis  in  the  city,  and  eight  hundred 
thousand  of  gonorrhea.  There  were  villages  in  France  before 
the  war  in  which  twenty-five  per  cent  of  the  inhabitants  were 
syphilitic,  and  in  Russia  there  were  towns  in  which  it  was 
said  that  every  person  was  syphilitic.  We  may  safely  say 
that  these  latter  are  the  only  towns  in  Europe  in  which  there 
was  not  an  enormous  increase  of  this  disease  during  and  since 
the  war. 

What  are  the  consequences  of  these  diseases?  The  con- 
sequences are  frightful  suffering,  not  merely  to  persons  guilty 
of  immorality,  but  to  innocent  persons.  Dr.  Morrow,  gen- 
erally recognized  as  the  leading  authority  on  this  subject, 
estimates  that  ten  per  cent  of  all  wives  are  infected  with 
venereal  disease  by  their  husbands;  he  estimates  that  thirty 
per  cent  of  all  the  infected  women  in  New  York  were  wives 
who  had  got  the  disease  from  their  husbands.  It  is  estimated 
that  thirty  per  cent  of  all  the  births,  where  either  parent  has 
syphilis,  result  in  abortions.  It  is  estimated  that  fifty  per  cent 
of  childlessness  in  marriage  is  caused  by  gonorrhea,  and  twen- 


The  Book  of  Love  31 

ty-five  per  cent  of  all  existing  blindness.  In  Germany,  before 
the  war,  there  were  thirty  thousand  persons  born  blind  from 
this  cause.  It  is  estimated  that  ninety-five  per  cent  of  all  abdom- 
inal operations  performed  upon  women  are  due  to  gonorrhea. 
And  any  of  these  horrors  may  fall  upon  persons  who  lead 
lives  of  the  strictest  chastity.  There  was  a  case  reported 
in  Germany  of  236  children  who  contracted  venereal  disease 
from  swimming  in  a  public  bath. 

All  these  things  are  products  of  our  system  of  marriage- 
plus-prostitution.  They  are  all  part  of  that  system,  and  no 
study  of  the  system  is  complete  without  them.  Everywhere 
throughout  modern  civilization  prostitution  is  an  enormous 
and  lucrative  industry.  In  New  York  it  is  estimated  to  give 
employment  to  two  hundred  thousand  women,  to  sav  nothing 
of  the  managers,  and  the  runners,  and  the  men  who  live  off 
the  women.  There  are  thousands  of  resorts,  large  and  small, 
high-priced  and  cheap,  and  the  police  know  all  about  it,  and 
derive  a  handsome  income  from  it.  And  you  find  it  the  same 
in  every  great  city  of  the  world;  in  every  port  where  sailors 
land,  or  every  place  where  crowds  of  men  are  expected.  If 
there  is  to  be  a  football  game,  or  a  political  convention,  the 
managers  of  the  industry  know  about  it,  and  while  they 
may  never  have  heard  the  libel  that  Socialism  preaches  sex- 
ual license,  they  all  know  that  capitalism  practices  it,  and 
they  provide  the  necessary  means.  In  the  United  States 
there  are  estimated  to  be  a  half  a  million  prostitutes,  count- 
ing the  inmates  of  houses  alone. 

During  the  late  war,  at  the  army  bases  in  France,  the 
British  government  maintained  official  brothels;  but  if  you 
published  anything  about  this  in  England,  you  ran  a  chance 
of  having  your  paper  suppressed.  During  the  occupation  of 
the  Rhine  country,  the  French  sent  in  negro  troops,  savages 
from  the  heart  of  Africa,  whose  custom  it  is  to  cut  off  the 
ears  of  their  enemies  in  battle;  and  the  French  army  com- 
pelled the  German  population  to  supply  white  women  for 
these  troops.  I  have  quoted  in  "The  Brass  Check"  a  pious 
editorial  from  the  Los  Angeles  Times,  bidding  the  mothers 
of  America  be  happy,  because  "our  boys  in  France"  were 
safe  in  the  protecting  arms  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  and  the  Knights 
of  Columbus.  I  dared  not  publish  at  this  time  a  passage 
which  I  had  clipped  from  the  London  Clarion,  in  which  A.  M. 
Thompson  told  how  he  watched  the  "doughboys"  in  the  cafes 


32  Love  and  Society 

of  Paris,  with  a  girl  on  each  knee,  and  a  glass  of  wine  in 
each  hand. 

I  will  add  one  little  anecdote,  giving  you  a  glimpse  of  the 
sex  conventions  of  war.  The  American  army  made  desperate 
efforts  to  keep  down  venereal  disease,  and  required  all  men 
to  report  to  their  regimental  surgeon  immediately  after  hav- 
ing had  sex  relations.  Our  army  moved  into  Coblentz,  and 
the  regulations  strictly  forbade  any  fraternizing  with  the 
inhabitants.  But  immediately  it  was  discovered  that  there 
was  an  increase  of  disease,  and  investigation  was  made,  and 
revealed  that  men  had  been  ceasing  to  report  to  the  surgeons, 
because  they  were  afraid  of  being  punished  for  having  "frat- 
ernized with  the  enemy."  So  a  new  order  was  issued,  pro- 
viding that  having  sexual  intercourse  would  not  be  considered 
as  "fraternizing."  I  do  not  know  any  better  way  to  distinguish 
my  ideal  of  morality  from  the  military  ideal,  than  to  say 
that  according  to  my  understanding  of  it,  the  sex  relationship 
should  always  and  everywhere  imply  and  include  "fraterniz- 
mg. 

Finally,  in  concluding  this  picture  of  our  present-day  sex 
arrangements,  there  is  a  brief  word  to  be  said  about  divorce. 
In  the  year  1916,  the  last  statistics  available  as  I  write,  there 
were  just  over  a  million  marriages  in  the  United  States,  and 
there  were  over  one  hundred  and  twelve  thousand  divorces. 
This  would  indicate  that  one  marriage  in  every  nine  resulted  in 
shipwreck.  But  as  a  matter  of  fact  the  proportion  is  greater, 
because  the  marriages  necessarily  precede  the  divorces,  and  the 
proportion  of  divorces  in  1916  should  be  calculated  upon  the 
number  of  marriages  which  took  place  some  five  or  ten  years 
previously.  Of  the  one  million  marriages  in  1916,  we  may  say 
that  one  in  seven  or  one  in  eight  will  end  in  the  divorce 
courts.  Let  this  suffice  for  a  gHmpse  of  the  system  of  mar- 
riage-plus-prostitution— a  field  of  weeds  which  we  have  some- 
how to  plow  up  and  prepare  for  a  harvest  of  rational  and 
honest  love! 


CHAPTER  XXXIII 

SEX  AND  NATURE 

(Maintains  that  our  sex  disorders  are  not  the  result  of  nat- 
yral  or  physical  disharmony.) 

Elie  Metchnikoff,  one  of  the  greatest  of  scientists,  wrote 
a  book  entitled  "The  Nature  of  Man,"  in  which  he  studied 
the  human  organism  from  the  point  of  view  of  biology, 
demonstrating  that  in  our  bodies  are  a  number  of  relics  of 
past  stages  of  evolution,  no  longer  useful,  but  rather  a  source 
of  danger  and  harm.  We  have,  for  example,  in  the  inner 
corner  of  the  eye  a  relic  of  that  third  eyelid  whereby  the 
eagle  is  enabled  to  look  at  the  sun.  This  is  a  harmless  relic. 
But  we  have  also  an  appendix,  a  degenerate  organ  of  diges- 
tion, or  gland  of  secretion,  which  now  serves  as  a  center  of 
infection  and  source  of  danger.  We  have  likewise  a  lower 
bowel,  a  survival  of  our  hay-eating  days,  and  a  cause  of  auto- 
intoxication and  premature  death.  Among  the  sources  of 
trouble,  MetchnikoflF  names  the  fact  that  the  human  male 
possesses  a  far  greater  quantity  of  sexual  energy  than  is 
required  for  purposes  of  procreation.  This  becomes  a  cause 
of  disharmony  and  excess,  it  causes  man  to  wreck  his  health 
and  destroy  himself. 

Manifestly,  this  is  a  serious  matter;  for  if  it  is  true, 
our  efforts  to  find  health  and  happiness  in  love  are  doomed 
to  failure,  and  Lecky  is  right  when  he  describes  the  prosti- 
tute as  the  "guardian  of  virtue,"  the  eternal  and  necessary 
scapegoat  of  humanity.  But  I  do  not  believe  it  is  true;  I 
think  that  here  is  one  more  case  of  the  endless  blundering 
of  scientists  and  philosophers  who  attempt  to  teach  physi- 
ology, politics,  religion  and  law,  without  having  made  a  study 
of  economics.  I  do  not  believe  that  the  sex  troubles  of 
mankind  are  physiological  in  their  nature,  but  have  their 
origin  in  our  present  system  of  class  privilege.  I  believe 
they  are  caused,  not  by  the  blunders  of  nature,  but  by  the 
blunders  of  man  as  a  social  animal. 

Let  us  take  a  glimpse  at  primitive  man.  I  choose  the 
Marquesas  Islands,  because  we  have  complete  reports  about 

33 


34  Love  and  Society 

them  from  numerous  observers.  Here  was  a  race  of  people, 
not  interfered  with  by  civilization,  who  manifested  all  that 
overplus  of  sexual  energy  to  which  Metchnikoff  calls  atten- 
tion. They  placed  no  restraint  whatever  upon  sex  activity, 
they  had  no  conception  of  such  an  idea.  Their  games  and 
dances  were  sex  play,  and  so  also,  in  great  part,  was  their 
religion.  Yet  we  do  not  find  that  they  wrecked  themselves. 
Physically  speaking,  they  were  one  of  the  most  perfect  races 
of  which  we  have  record.  Both  the  men  and  women  were 
beautiful;  they  were  active  and  strong  from  childhood  to 
old  age,  and — here  is  the  significant  thing — ^they  were  happy. 
They  were  a  laughing,  dancing,  singing  race.  They  hardly 
knew  grief  or  fear  at  all.  They  knew  how  to  live,  and  they 
enjoyed  every  process  and  aspect  of  their  lives,  just  as  children 
do,  naively  and  simply.  This  included  their  sex  life;  and 
I  think  it  assures  us  that  there  can  be  no  such  fundamental 
physical  disharmony  in  the  human  organism  as  the  great  Rus- 
sian scientist  thought  he  had  discovered. 

Is  it  not  a  fact  that  throughout  nature  a  superfluity  of 
any  kind  of  energy  or  product  may  be  a  source  of  happiness, 
rather  than  of  distress?  Consider  the  singing  of  the  birds! 
Or  consider  nature's  impulse  to  cover  a  field  with  useless 
plants,  and  how  by  a  little  cunning,  we  are  able  to  turn  it  into 
a  harvest  for  our  own  use!  In  the  life  of  our  bodies  one 
may  show  the  same  thing  again  and  again.  We  have  within 
us  the  possibility  of  and  the  impulse  toward  more  muscular 
activity  than  our  survival  makes  necessary;  but  we  do  not 
regard  this  additional  energy  as  a  curse  of  nature,  and  a 
peril  to  our  lives — we  turn  out  and  play  baseball.  We  have 
an  impulse  to  see  more  than  is  necessary,  so  we  climb  moun- 
tains, or  go  traveling.  We  have  an  impulse  to  hear  more, 
so  we  go  to  a  concert.  We  have  an  impulse  to  think  more, 
so  we  play  chess,  or  whist,  or  write  books  and  accumulate 
libraries.  Never  do  we  think  of  these  activities  as  signs  of 
an  irrevocable  blunder  on  the  part  of  nature. 

But  about  the  activities  of  love  we  feel  differently;  and 
why  is  this?  If  I  say  that  it  is  because  we  have  an  unwhole- 
some and  degraded  attitude  toward  love,  because,  as  a  result 
of  religious  superstition  we  fear  it,  and  dare  not  deal  with 
it  honestly,  the  reader  may  suspect  that  I  am  preparing  to 
hint  at  some  self-indulgence,  some  form  of  sex  orgy  such 
as  the  "turkey  trot"  and  the  "bunny  hug"  and  the  "grizzly 


The  Book  of  Love  35 

bear,"  the  "shimmy"  and  the  "toddle"  and  the  "cuddle."  I 
hasten  to  explain  that  I  do  not  mean  any  of  the  abnormali- 
ties and  monstrosities  of  present-day  fashionable  life.  Neither 
do  I  mean  that  we  should  set  out  to  emulate  the  happy  can- 
nibals in  the  South  Seas.  In  the  Book  of  the  Mind  I  set 
forth  as  carefully  as  I  knew  how,  the  difference  between 
nature  and  man,  the  life  of  instinct  and  the  life  of  reason. 
It  is  my  conviction  that  if  civilized  life  is  to  go  on,  there 
must  be  a  far  wider  extension  of  judgment  and  self-control 
in  human  affairs;  our  lost  happiness  will  be  found,  not  by 
going  "back  to  nature,"  but  by  going  forward  to  a  new  and 
higher  state,  planned  by  reason  and  impelled  by  moral  ideal- 
ism. 

But  we  find  ourselves  face  to  face  with  horrible  sex  dis- 
orders, and  a  great  scientist  tells  us  they  are  nature's  tragic 
blunder,  of  which  we  are  the  helpless  victims.  Manifestly, 
the  way  to  decide  this  question  is  to  go  to  nature,  and  see  if 
primitive  people,  having  the  same  physical  organism  as  ours, 
had  the  same  troubles  and  spent  their  lives  in  the  same 
misery.  If  they  did,  then  it  may  be  that  we  are  doomed; 
but  if  they  did  not,  then  we  can  say  with  certainty  that  it  is 
not  nature,  but  ourselves,  who  have  blundered.  Our  task 
then  becomes  to  apply  reason  to  the  problem;  to  take  our 
present  sex  arrangements,  our  field  of  bad-smelling  weeds, 
and  plow  it  thoroughly,  and  sow  it  with  good  seed,  and  raise 
a  harvest  of  happiness  in  love.  It  is  my  belief  that,  admitting 
true  love — honest  and  dignified  and  rational  love — it  is  pos- 
sible to  pour  into  it  any  amount  of  sex  energy,  to  invent  a 
whole  new  system  of  beautiful  and  happy  love  play. 


CHAPTER  XXXIV 

LOVE  AND  ECONOMICS 

(Maintains  that  our  sex  disorders  are  of  social  origin,  due  to 
the  displacing  of  love  by  money  as  a  motive  in  mating.) 

If  the  cause  of  our  sex  disorders  is  not  physiological, 
what  is  it?  Everything  in  nature  must  have  a  cause,  and 
this  includes  human  nature,  the  actions  and  feelings  of  men, 
both  as  individuals  and  as  groups.  We  hear  the  saying :  "You 
can't  change  human  nature" ;  but  the  fact  is  that  human  nature 
is  one  of  the  most  changeable  things  in  the  world.  We  can 
watch  it  changing  from  age  to  age,  for  better  or  for  worse, 
and  if  we  had  the  intelligence  to  use  the  forces  now  at  our 
command,  we  could  mold  human  nature,  as  precisely  as  a 
brewer  converts  a  carload  of  hops  into  a  certain  brand  of 
beer.  Voltaire  was  author  of  the  saying,  "Vice  and  virtue 
are  products  like  vinegar." 

Our  civilization  is  based  upon  industrial  exploitation  and 
class  privilege,  the  monopoly  of  the  means  of  production  and 
the  natural  sources  of  wealth  by  a  group.  This  enables  the 
privileged  group  to  live  in  idleness  upon  the  labor  of  the 
rest  of  society;  it  confers  unlimited  power  with  practically 
no  responsibility — a  strain  which  not  one  human  being  in  a 
thousand  has  the  moral  strength  to  endure.  History  for  the 
past  five  thousand  years  is  one  demonstration  after  another 
that  the  conferring  upon  a  class  of  power  without  responsi- 
bility means  the  collapse  of  that  class  and  the  downfall  of 
its  civilization. 

So  far  as  concerns  the  ruling  class  male,  what  the  system 
of  privilege  does  is  to  give  him  unlimited  ability  to  indulge 
his  sex  desires.  What  it  does  for  the  female  is  to  submit 
her  to  the  male  desires,  and  to  abolish  that  mutuality  in  sex, 
that  interaction  between  male  and  female  influence,  which  is 
the  very  essence  of  its  purpose.  Woman,  in  a  predatory 
society,  is  subject  to  a  double  enslavement,  that  of  class  as 
well  as  of  sex,  and  the  result  is  the  perverting  of  sexual 
selection,  and  a  constantly  increasing  tendency  towards  the 
survival  of  the  unfit. 

36 


The  Book  of  Love  37 

In  a  state  of  nature  the  males  compete  among  them- 
selves for  the  favor  of  the  female.  The  female  is  not  raped, 
nor  is  she  kidnapped;  on  the  contrary,  she  exercises  her 
prerogative,  she  inspects  the  various  male  charms  which  are 
set  before  her,  and  selects  those  which  please  her,  according 
to  her  deeply  planted  instincts.  The  result  is  that  the  weak 
and  unfit  males  seldom  have  a  chance  to  reproduce  them- 
selves, and  the  procreating  is  done  by  the  highest  specimens 
of  the  type. 

But  now  we  have  a  world  which  is  ruled  by  money,  in 
which  opportunity,  and  indeed  survival,  depend  upon  money, 
and  the  whole  tendency  of  society  is  to  make  money  stand- 
ards supreme.  We  do  not  like  to  admit  this,  of  course; 
our  instincts  revolt  against  it,  and  our  higher  faculties  rein- 
force the  revolt,  so  we  carefully  veil  our  money  motives,, 
and  invent  polite  phrases  to  conceal  them.  You  will  hear 
people  deny  it  is  money  which  determines  admission  into  what 
is  called  "society,"  the  intimate  life  of  the  ruling  class.  They 
will  tell  you  that  it  is  not  money,  it  is  "good  taste,"  "refine- 
ment," "charm  of  personality,"  and  so  on.  But  if  you  analyze 
all  these  things,  you  speedily  discover  that  they  are  made  out 
of  money;  they  are  symbols  6f  the  possession  of  money, 
devised  by  those  who  possess  it,  as  a  means  of  keeping  them- 
selves apart  from  those  who  do  not  possess  it.  I  would  safely 
defy  a  member  of  the  ruling  class  to  name  a  single  element 
in  what  he  calls  "refinement,"  or  "good  taste,"  that  is  not  in 
its  ultimate  analysis  a  symbol  of  the  possession  of  money. 
Let  it  be  the  pronunciation  of  a  word,  or  the  cut  of  a  coat, 
or  the  method  of  handling  a  fork — whatever  it  may  be,  it 
is  part  of  a  code,  revealing  that  the  person,  or  more  impor- 
tant yet,  the  ancestors  of  the  person,  have  belonged  to  the 
leisure  class,  and  have  had  time  and  opportunity  to  learn  to 
do  things  in  a  certain  precise  conventional  way.  I  say  "con- 
ventional," for  very  frequently  these  tests  have  no  relation- 
ship whatever  to  reality.  Considered  as  a  matter  of  common 
sense  and  convenience,  it  is  a  great  deal  better  to  eat  peas 
with  a  spoon  than  with  a  fork,  and  to  use  both  a  knife  and 
fork  in  eating  lettuce;  but  if  you  eat  peas  with  a  spoon,  or 
use  a  knife  on  lettuce,  every  member  of  the  ruling  class  will 
instantly  know  that  you  are  an  interloper,  as  much  so  as 
if  you  took  to  throwing  the  china  at  your  hostess. 

Our  culture  is  a  money  culture,  our  standards  are  money 


38  Love  and  Society 

standards,  and  our  sex  decisions  are  based  upon  money,  not 
upon  love.  Any  man  can  have  money  in  our  society,  provided 
the  accident  of  birth  favors  him,  and  it  is  everywhere  known 
that  any  man  who  has  money  can  get  a  wife.  It  is  certainly 
not  true  that  any  man  with  no  money  can  get  a  wife,  and 
it  is  true  that  most  men  who  have  little  money  have  to 
take  wives  who  have  less — that  is,  who  belong  to  a  lower 
class,  according  to  the  world's  standards.  The  average  young 
girl  of  the  propertied  classes  is  trained  for  marriage  as  for 
any  other  business.  She  is  taught  to  be  sexually  cold,  but 
to  imitate  sexual  excitement  deliberately,  so  as  to  arouse  it 
in  the  male,  and  to  keep  herself  surrounded  with  a  swarm 
of  males;  this  being  the  basis  of  her  prestige,  the  factor 
which  will  cause  the  "eligible"  man,  the  "catch,"  to  desire 
her.  In  polite  society  this  proceeding  is  known  as  "coquetry," 
or  "charm,"  and  it  would  be  no  exaggeration  to  say  that 
seventy-five  per  cent  of  all  the  novels  so  far  written  in  the 
world  are  expositions  of  this  activity;  also  that  when  we 
go  to  the  theater,  we  go  in  order  to  watch  and  sympathize 
with  these  manifestations  of  pecuniary  sexuality. 

As  a  rule  the  young  girl  knows  what  she  is  doing,  but 
she  is  taught  to  camouflage  it,  to  preserve  her  "innocence." 
She  would  not  dream  of  marrying  for  money;  she  wants  to 
marry  something  "distinguished" — that  is  to  say,  something 
which  has  received  the  stamp  of  approval  from  a  world  which 
approves  money.  She  wants  to  marry  somebody  who  is 
"elegant,"  who  is  in  "good  form";  she  wants  to  marry  with- 
out having  to  think  about  the  horrid  subject  of  money  at  all, 
and  so  she  is  carefully  chaperoned,  and  confined  to  a  world 
where  nothing  but  money  is  to  be  met.  In  Tennyson's  poem, 
"The  Northern  Farmer,"  the  old  fellow  is  coaching  his  son 
on  the  subject  of  marriage,  and  they  are  driving  along  a 
road,  and  the  farmer  listens  to  his  horses'  hoofs,  and  they  are 
saying,  "Proputty,  proputty,  proputty !"  The  farmer  sums  up 
in  one  sentence  the  doctrine  of  pecuniary  marriage  as  it  is 
taught  to  the  ruling  class  virgin:  "Doan't  thee  marry  for 
money,  but  goa  wheer  money  is." 

In  this  process,  of  course,  the  ruling  class  virgin  must 
spend  a  great  deal  of  money  in  order  to  keep  up  her  own 
prestige;  and  when  she  is  married,  she  must  spend  it  to 
keep  up  the  prestige  of  her  unmarried  sisters,  and  then  of 
her  children.    As  a  result  of  this,  the  only  ruling  class  males 


The  Book  of  Love  39 

who  can  afford  to  marry  are  the  rich  ones.  There  are  always 
some  who  are  richer,  and  these  are  the  most  desirable;  so 
the  tendency  with  each  generation  is  to  put  the  period  of 
marriage  further  off;  the  man  has  to  wait  until  he  has  accu- 
mulated enough  "proputty"  to  satisfy  the  girl  of  his  desires — 
a  girl  whom  he  admires  because  of  her  pecuniary  prestige- 
He  delays,  and  meantime  he  satisfies  his  passions  with  the 
daughters  of  the  poor.  As  a  result  of  this,  when  he  does 
finally  come  to  marry,  he  is  apt  to  be  unlovely  and  unlovable. 
The  woman  frequently  does  not  love  him  at  all,  but  takes 
him  cold-bloodedly  because  he  is  "eligible";  in  that  case  she 
is  a  cold  and  "sexless"  wife.  Or  else,  after  she  has  married 
him  she  discovers  his  unloveliness,  and  either  decides  that 
all  men  are  selfish  brutes,  and  reconciles  herself  to  a  celibate 
life,  or  else  she  goes  out  and  preys  upon  the  domestic  hap- 
piness of  other  women. 


CHAPTER  XXXV 

MARRIAGE  AND  MONEY 

(Discusses  the  causes  of  prostitution,  and  that  higher  form 
of  prostitution  known  as  the  "marriage  of  convenience.") 

I  realize  that  all  these  sex  problems  are  complipated. 
Every  case  is  individual,  and  in  no  two  cases  can  you  give 
exactly  the  same  explanation.  But  it  is  my  thesis  that  what- 
ever the  cause,  if  you  trace  down  the  causes  of  the  cause, 
you  will  find  economic  inequality  and  class  privilege.  It  is 
evident  in  the  lives  of  the  rich,  and  it  is  even  more  evident 
in  the  lives  of  the  poor,  who  are  not  permitted  the  luxury 
of  pretense.  The  poor  live  in  a  world  dominated  by  forces 
■which  they  seldom  understand,  subjected  to  enormous  pres- 
sure which  crushes  and  destroys  them,  without  their  being 
able  to  see  it  or  touch  it.  In  the  world  of  the  poor  there 
is  first  of  all  poverty;  there  is  insecurity  of  employment  and 
insufficiency  of  wage,  and  the  daily  and  hourly  terror  of  star- 
vation and  ruin.  Above  this  is  a  world  of  power  and  luxury, 
a  wonderland  of  marvels  and  thrills,  seen  through  a  colored 
mist  of  romance.  The  working-class  girl,  born  to  drudgery 
and  perpetual  child-bearing,  has  a  brief  hour  in  which  her 
cheeks  are  red  and  her  beauty  is  ripe;  and  out  of  the  heaven 
above  her  steps  a  male  creature  panoplied  in  the  armor  of 
ruling  class  prestige — ^that  is  to  say,  a  dress  suit — and  scatter- 
ing about  him  a  shower  of  automobile  rides,  jewelry  and  candy 
and  flowers.  She  opens  her  arms  to  him;  and  then,  when 
her  brief  hour  of  rapture  is  past,  she  becomes  the  domestic 
drudge  of  some  workingman,  or  else  the  inmate  of  a  brothel. 

It  is  a  custom  of  social  workers  and  church  people,  seek- 
ing data  about  these  painful  subjects,  to  interview  numbers 
of  prostitutes,  and  question  them  as  to  the  causes  of  their 
"fall";  so  you  read  statistics  to  the  effect  that  seventeen  per 
cent  of  prostitution  has  an  economic  cause,  that  twenty-six 
per  cent  is  caused  by  love  of  finery,  etc.  These  pious  people, 
employed  by  the  ruling  class  to  maintain  ruling  class  prestige 
by  demonstrating  that  wage  slavery  has  nothing  to  do  with 

40 


The  Book  of  Love  *l 

white  slavery,  attain  their  purpose  by  restricting  the  word 
"economic"  to  food  and  shelter;  forgetting  that  young  girls 
do  not  live  by  bread  alone,  but  also  by  ribbons,  and  silk 
stockings,  and  moving  picture  shows,  and  trips  to  Coney  Island, 
and  everything  else  that  gives  a  momentary  escape  from 
drudgery  into  joy.  We  all  understand,  of  course,  that  the 
daughters  of  the  rich  are  entitled  to  joy,  and  we  provide 
them  with  it  as  a  matter  of  course;  but  the  daughters  of 
the  poor  are  supposed  to  work  in  a  cotton  mill  ten  or  eleven 
hours  a  day  from  earliest  childhood,  and  the  joy  we  provide 
for  them  is  vicarious.    As  a  woman  poet  sets  it  forth: 

"The  golf  links  lie  so  near  the  mill 
That  almost  every  day. 
The  laboring  children  can  look  out 
And  see  the  men  at  play." 

Some  years  ago  my  wife  and  I  were  invited  to  meet  Mrs. 
Mary  J.  Goode,  a  keeper  of  brothels  in  the  "Tenderloin," 
who  had  revolted  against  the  system  of  police  graft,  and  had 
exposed  it  in  the  newspapers.  My  wife  questioned  her  closely 
as  to  the  psychology  of  people  in  her  business,  and  she  insisted 
that  the  majority  of  prostitutes  were  not  oversexed,  nor  were 
they  feeble  minded;  they  were  women  who  had  loved  and 
trusted,  and  had  been  "thrown  down."  As  Mrs.  Goode 
phrased  it,  they  said  to  themselves:  "Never  again!  After 
this,  they'll  pay!" 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  causes  of  prostitution  are  so 
largely  economic  that  the  other  factors  are  hardly  worth  men- 
tioning. The  sale  of  sex  is  unknown  in  savage  society,  and 
would  be  unknown  in  a  Socialist  society.  If  here  and  there 
some  degenerate  individual  would  rather  sell  her  sex  than 
do  her  share  of  honest  labor  in  a  free  and  just  world,  such 
an  individual  would  become  a  patient  in  the  psychopathic 
ward  of  a  public  hospital.  Economic  forces  drive  women  to 
prostitution,  first,  by  direct  starvation,  and  second,  by  teach- 
ing them  money  standards  of  prestige,  the  ideal  of  living 
without  working,  which  is  the  heaven  achieved  by  the  rich 
and  longed  for  by  the  poor.  Contributory  to  the  process 
are  policemen,  politicians,  and  judges  who  protect  the  prop- 
erty of  the  rich,  and  prey  upon  the  disinherited;  also  news- 
paper editors,  college  professors,  priests  of  God  and  preach- 


42  Lo\TE  AND  Society 

ers  of  Jesus,  who  attribute  the  social  evil  to  "original  sin," 
or  the  "weakness  of  human  nature." 

So  far  as  men  are  concerned,  economic  forces  operate 
by  three  main  channels ;  late  marriage,  loveless  marriage,  and 
drudgery  in  wives.  You  will  find  patronizing  and  maintain- 
ing the  brothels  the  following  kinds  of  males;  first,  young 
boys  who  have  been  taught  that  it  is  "manly"  to  gratify  their 
sex  impulses;  second,  young  men  who  take  it  for  granted 
that  they  cannot  afford  to  marry;  third,  old  bachelors  who 
have  looked  at  marriage  and  decided  that  it  is  not  a  paying 
proposition;  fourth,  married  men  who  have  been  picked  out 
for  their  money,  and  have  come  to  the  conclusion  that  "good 
women"  are  necessarily  sexless;  and  finally,  married  men 
whose  wives  have  lost  the  power  to  charm  them  by  continuous 
childbearing,  and  the  physical  and  nervous  strain  of  domestic 
slavery. 

This  latter  applies  not  merely  to  the  wives  of  the  poor. 
It  applies  to  members  of  the  middle  classes,  and  even  of  the 
richer  classes,  because  the  job  of  managing  many  servants 
is  often  as  trying  as  the  doing  of  one's  own  work.  To  explain 
how  domestic  drudgery  is  caused  by  economic  pressure  would 
require  a  little  essay  in  itself.  The  home  is  the  place  where 
the  man  keeps  his  sex  property  apart  under  lock  and  key, 
and  it  is,  therefore,  the  portion  of  our  civilization  least 
influenced  by  modern  ideas.  Women  still  drudge  in  separate 
kitchens  and  nurseries,  as  they  have  drudged  for  thousands 
of  years.  They  cook  their  dinners  over  separate  fires,  and 
have  each  their  own  little  group  of  children,  generally  ill  cared 
for,  because  the  work  is  done  by  an  untrained  amateur. 
Moreover,  the  prestige  of  this  home  has  to  be  kept  up,  because 
the  social  position  and  future  prosperity  of  the  man  depend 
upon  it.  The  children  must  be  dressed  in  frilled  and  starched 
clothing,  which  makes  them  miserable,  and  wears  out  the 
tempers  and  pocketbooks  of  the  mothers.  Costly  entertain- 
ments must  be  given,  and  twice  a  day  a  meal  must  be  prepared 
for  the  father  of  the  family — all  good  wives  have  learned  the 
ancient  formula  for  the  retention  of  masculine  affections: 
"Feed  the  brute!"  Living  in  a  world  of  pecuniary  prestige, 
every  particle  of  the  woman's  surplus  energy  must  go  into 
some  form  of  ostentation,  into  buying  or  making  things  which 
are  futile  and  meaningless.  In  such  a  blind  world,  dazed  by 
such  a  struggle,  women  become  irritable,  they  lose  their  sex 


The  Book  of  Love  43 

charm,  they  forget  all  about  love;  so  the  husband  gives  up 
hoping  for  the  impossible,  accepts  the  common  idea  that  love 
and  marriage  are  incompatible,  and  adopts  the  formula  that 
what  his  wife  doesn't  know  will  not  hurt  her. 

And  step  by  step,  as  economic  evolution  progresses,  as 
vested  wealth  becomes  more  firmly  established  and  claims  for 
itself  a  larger  and  larger  share  of  the  total  product  of  society 
— so  step  by  step  you  find  the  pecuniary  ideals  becoming  more 
firmly  established,  you  find  marriage  becoming  more  and 
more  a  matter  of  property,  and  less  and  less  a  matter  of  love. 
In  European  countries  there  may  still  be  some  love  mar- 
riages among  the  poor,  but  in  the  upper  classes  there  is  no 
longer  any  pretense  of  such  a  thing,  and  if  you  spoke  of  it 
you  would  be  considere'd  absurd.  In  countries  of  fresh  and 
naive  commercialism,  like  America,  the  women  select  the  men 
because  of  their  money  prestige ;  but  in  Germany,  the  process 
has  gone  a  step  further — ^the  men  are  so  firmly  established 
in  their  class  positions  that  they  insist  upon  being  bought 
with  a  fortune.  The  same  is  true  when  titled  foreigners 
condescend  to  visit  our  "land  of  the  dollar."  They  will 
stoop  to  a  vulgar  American  wife  only  in  case  her  parents 
will  make  a  direct  settlement  of  a  fortune  upon  the  husband, 
and  then  they  take  her  back  home,  and  find  their  escape  from 
boredom  in  the  highly  cultivated  mistresses  of  their  own  land. 

Everywhere  on  the  Continent,  and  in  Great  Britain  also, 
it  is  accepted  that  marriages  are  matters  of  business,  and 
only  incidentally  and  very  slightly  of  aflrection.  The  initiative 
is  commonly  taken,  not  by  the  young  people,  but  by  the  heads 
of  the  families.  Preliminary  protocols  are  exchanged,  and 
then  the  family  solicitors  sit  down  and  bargain  over  the  mat- 
ter. If  they  were  making  a  deal  for  a  carload  of  hams,  they 
would  be  governed  by  the  market  price  of  hams  at  the  moment, 
also  by  the  reputation  of  that  particular  brand  of  ham;  and 
similarly,  in  the  case  of  marriage,  they  are  governed  by  the 
prestige  of  the  family  names,  and  the  market  price  of  hus- 
bands prevailing.  Always  the  man  exacts  a  cash  settlement, 
and  in  Catholic  countries  he  becomes  the  outright  owner  of 
all  the  property  of  his  wife,  thus  reducing  her  completely  to 
the  status  of  a  chattel.  If  any  young  couple  dares  to  break 
through  these  laws  of  their  class,  the  whole  class  unites  to 
trample  them  down.  One  of  the  greatest  of  English  novel- 
ists, George  Meredith,  wrote  his  greatest  novel,  "The  Ordeal 


44  Love  and  Society 

of  Richard  Feverel,"  to  show  how,  under  the  most  favorable 
circumstances,  the  union  of  a  ruling  class  youth  with  a  farm- 
er's daughter  could  result  in  nothing  but  shipwreck. 

The  country  in  which  the  property  marriage  is  most  firmly 
established  is  probably  France;  and  in  France  the  rights  of 
nature  are  recognized  in  a  kind  of  supplementary  union, 
which  constitutes  what  is  known  as  the  "domestic  triangle," 
or  in  the  French  language,  "la  vie  trois."  The  young  girl 
of  the  French  ruling  classes  is  guarded  every  moment  of  her 
life  like  a  prisoner  in  jail.  She  is  sold  in  marriage,  and  is 
expected  to  bear  her  husband  an  heir,  possibly  two  or  three 
children.  After  that,  she  is  considered,  not  under  the  law  or 
by  the  church,  but  by  the  general  common  sense  of  the  com- 
munity, to  be  free  to  seek  satisfaction  of  her  love  needs.  Her 
husband  has  mistresses,  and  she  has  a  lover,  and  to  that 
lover  she  is  faithful,  and  in  her  dealings  with  him  she  is 
guided  by  an  elaborate  and  subtle  code.  Practically  all  French 
fiction  and  drama  deal  with  this  "life  in  threes,"  and  the  com- 
plications and  tragedies  which  result  from  it.  I  name  one 
novel,  simply  because  it  happens  to  be  the  last  that  I  myself 
have  read,  "The  Red  Lily,"  by  Anatole  France. 

Of  course,  every  human  being  knows  in  his  heart  that 
this  is  a  monstrous  arrangement,  and  there  are. periods  of 
revolt  when  real  feeling  surges  up  in  the  hearts  of  men,  and 
we  have  stories  of  true  love,  young  and  unselfish  love,  such 
<U  for  example  as  Goethe's  "Hermann  and  Dorothea,"  or  St. 
'  Pierre's  "Paul  and  Virginia,"  or  Halevy's  "L'Abbe  Constan- 
tin."  Everybody  reads  these  stories  and  weeps  over  them, 
but  everybody  knows  that  they  are  like  the  romantic  shepherds 
and  shepherdesses  of  the  ancient  regime;  they  never  had  any 
existence  in  reality,  and  are  not  meant  to  be  taken  seriously.  If 
anybody  attempts  to  carry  them  into  action,  or  to  preach  them 
seriously  to  the  young,  then  we  know  that  we  are  dealing 
with  a  disturber  of  the  foundations  of  the  social  order,  a 
dangerous  and  incendiary  villain,  and  we  give  him  a  name 
which  sends  a  shudder  down  the  spine  of  every  friend  of 
law  and  order — we  call  him  a  "free-lover." 

I  see  before  my  eyes  the  wretch  cowering  upon  the  witness 
stand,  and  the  virtuous  district  attorney,  who  has  perhaps 
spent  the  previous  night  in  a  brothel,  pointing  a  finger  of 
accusing  wrath  into  his  face,  and  thundering,  "Do  you  believe 
in  free  love?"     The  wretch,  if  he  is  wise,  will  not  hesitate 


The  Book  of  Love  45 

or  parley ;  he  will  not  ask  what  the  district  attorney  means  by 
love,  or  what  he  means  by  freedom.  Here  in  very  truth  is  a 
case  where  "he  who  hesitates  is  lost !"  Let  the  wretch  instantly 
answer.  No,  he  does  not  believe  in  free  love,  he  believes  in 
love  that  pays  cash  as  it  goes;  he  believes  in  love  that 
investigates  carefully  the  prevailing  market  conditions,  decides 
upon  a  reasonable  price,  has  the  contract  in  writing,  and  lives 
up  to  the  bargain — "till  death  do  us  part."  If  the  witness 
be  a  woman,  let  the  answer  be  that  she  believes  in  slave  love ; 
that  she  expects  to  be  sold  for  the  benefit  of  her  parents, 
the  prestige  of  her  family  and  the  social  position  of  her  future 
offspring.  Let  her  say  that  she  will  be  a  loyal  and  devoted 
servant,  and  will  never  do  anything  at  any  time  to  invalidate 
the  contract  which  is  signed  for  her  by  her  parents  or 
guardians. 


CHAPTER  XXXVI 

LOVE  VERSUS  LUST 

(Discusses  the  sex  impulse,  its  use  and  misuse;  when  it  should 
be  followed  and  when  repressed.) 

We  have  considered  the  sex  disorders  of  our  age  and 
their  causes.  We  have  now  to  grope  our  way  towards  a  basis 
of  sanity  and  health  in  these  vital  matters. 

Consider  man,  as  Metchnikoff  describes  him,  with  his  over- 
plus of  sex  energy.  From  early  youth  he  is  besieged  by 
impulses  and  desires,  and  as  a  rule  is  left  entirely  uninstructed 
on  the  subject,  having  to  pick  up  his  ideas  from  the  conver- 
sation of  older  lads,  who  have  nothing  but  misinformation 
and  perversions  to  give  him.  Nearly  all  these  older  lads 
declare  and  believe  that  it  is  necessary  to  gratify  the  sex 
impulse,  that  physically  it  is  harmful  not  to  do  so.  I  have 
even  heard  physicians  and  trainers  maintain  that  idea.  Op- 
posed to  them  are  the  official  moralists  and  preachers  of 
religion,  who  declare  that  to  follow  the  sex  impulse,  except 
when  officially  sanctioned  by  the  church,  is  to  commit  sin. 

At  different  times  in  my  life  I  have  talked  with  all  kinds 
of  people,  young  and  old,  men  and  women,  doctors  and  clergy- 
men, teachers  and  trainers  of  athletes,  and  a  few  wise  and 
loving  mothers  who  have  talked  with  their  own  boys  and 
other  boys.  As  a  result  I  have  come  to  agree  with  neither 
side  in  the  debate.  I  believe  that  there  is  a  distinction  which 
must  be  drawn,  and  I  ask  you  to  consider  it  carefully,  and 
bear  it  in  mind  in  all  that  I  say  on  the  problem  of  happiness 
and  health  in  sex. 

I  believe  that  a  normal  man  is  one  being,  manifesting 
himself  in  various  aspects,  physical,  emotional,  intellectual. 
I  believe  that  all  these  aspects  of  human  activity  go  normally 
together,  and  cannot  normally  be  separated,  and  that  the 
separation  of  them  is  a  perversion  and  source  of  harm.  I 
believe  that  the  sex  impulse,  as  it  normally  manifests  itself, 
and  would  manifest  itself  in  a  man  if  he  were  living  a  normal 
life,  is  an  impuse  which  includes  every  aspect  of  the  man's 
being.     It  is  not  merely  physical  desire  and  emotional  excite- 

46 


The  Book  of  Love  47 

ment;  it  is  intellectual  curiosity,  a  deep  and  intense  interest, 
not  merely  in  the  body,  but  in  the  mind  and  heart  and  per- 
sonality of  the  woman. 

I  appreciate  that  there  is  opportunity  for  controversy  here. 
As  a  matter  of  psychology,  it  is  not  easy  to  separate  instinct 
from  experience,  to  state  whether  a  certain  impulse  is  innate 
or  acquired.  Some  may  argue  that  savages  know  nothing 
about  idealism  in  sex,  neither  do  those  modern  savages  whom 
we  breed  in  city  slums;  some  may  make  the  same  assertion 
concerning  a  great  mass  of  loutish  and  sensual  youths.  We 
have  got  so  far  from  health  and  soundness  that  it  is  hard 
to  be  sure  what  is  "normal"  and  what  is  "ideal."  But  with- 
out going  into  metaphysics,  I  think  we  can  reasonably  make 
the  following  statement  concerning  the  sex  impulse  at  its 
first  appearance  in  the  average  healthy  youth  in  civilized 
societies;  that  this  impulse,  going  to  the  roots  of  the  being, 
affecting  every  atom  of  energy  and  every  faculty,  is  accom- 
panied, not  merely  by  happiness,  but  by  sympathetic  delight 
in  the  happiness  of  the  woman,  by  interest  in  the  woman,  by 
desire  to  be  with  her,  to  stay  with  her  and  share  her  life  and 
protect  her  from  harm.  In  what  I  have  to  say  about  the 
subject  from  now  on,  I  shall  describe  this  condition  of  being 
and  feeling  by  the  word  "love." 

But  now  suppose  that  men  should,  for  some  reason  or 
other,  evolve  a  set  of  religious  ideas  which  denied  love,  and 
repudiated  love,  and  called  it  a  sin  and  a  humiliation;  or 
suppose  there  should  be  an  economic  condition  which  made 
love  a  peril,  so  that  the  young  couple  which  yielded  to  love 
would  be  in  danger  of  starvation,  or  of  seeing  their  children 
starve.  Suppose  there  should  be  evolved  classes  of  men  and 
women,  held  by  society  in  a  condition  of  permanent  semi- 
starvation;  then,  under  such  conditions,  the  impulse  to  love 
would  become  a  trap  and  a  source  of  terror.  Then  the  ener- 
gies of  a  great  many  men  would  be  devoted  to  suppressing 
love  and  strangling  it  in  themselves;  then  the  intellectual  and 
spiritual  sanctions  of  love  would  be  withdrawn,  the  beauty 
and  charm  and  joy  would  go  out  of  it,  and  it  would  become 
a  starvling  beggar  at  the  gates,  or  a  thief  skulking  in  the 
night-time,  or  an  assassin  with  a  dagger  and  club.  In  other 
words,  sex  would  become  all  the  horror  that  it  is  today,  in 
the  form  of  purchased  vice,  and  more  highly  purchased  mar- 
riage, and  secret  shame,  and  obscure  innuendo.    So  we  should 


48  Love  and  Society 

have  what  is,  in  a  civiHzed  man,  a  perversion,  the  possibility 
of  love  which  is  physical  alone;  a  purely  animal  thing  in  a 
being  who  is  not  purely  animal,  but  is  body,  mind  and  spirit 
all  together.  So  it  would  be  possible  for  pitiful,  unhappy 
man,  driven  by  the  blind  urge  of  nature,  to  conceive  of  desir- 
ing a  woman  only  in  the  body,  and  with  no  care  about  what 
she  felt,  or  what  she  thought,  or  what  became  of  her  after- 
wards. 

That  purely  physical  sex  desire  I  will  indicate  in  our 
future  discussions  by  the  only  convenient  word  that  I  can 
find,  which  is  lust.  The  word  has  religious  implications, 
so  I  explain  that  I  use  it  in  my  own  meaning,  as  above. 
There  is  a  great  deal  of  what  the  churches  call  lust,  which 
I  call  true  and  honest  love;  on  the  other  hand,  in  Christian 
•churches  today,  there  are  celebrated  innumerable  marriages 
between  innocent  young  girls  and  mature  men  of  property, 
which  I  describe  as  legalized  and  consecrated  lust. 

We  are  now  in  position  to  make  a  fundamental  distinc- 
tion. I  assert  the  proposition  that  there  does  not  exist,  in 
any  man,  at  any  time  of  his  life,  or  in  any  condition  of  his 
health,  a  necessity  for  yielding  to  the  impulses  of  lust;  and 
I  say  that  no  man  can  yield  to  them  without  degrading  his 
nature  and  injuring  himself,  not  merely  morally,  but  men- 
tally, and  in  the  long  run  physically.  I  assert  that  it  is  the 
duty  of  every  man,  at  all  times  and  under  all  circumstances, 
to  resist  the  impulses  of  lust,  to  suppress  and  destroy  them 
in  his  nature,  by  whatever  expenditure  of  will  power  and 
moral  effort  may  be  required. 

I  know  physicians  who  maintain  the  unpopular  thesis  that 
serious  damage  may  be  done  to  the  physical  organism  of  both 
man  and  woman  by  the  long  continued  suppression  of  the  sex- 
life.  Let  me  make  plain  that  I  am  not  disagreeing  with 
such  men.  I  do  not  deny  that  repression  of  the  sex-life 
may  do  harm.  What  I  do  deny  is  that  it  does  any  harm  to 
repress  a  physical  desire  which  is  unaccompanied  by  the 
higher  elements  of  sex;  that  is  to  say,  by  affection,  admira- 
tion, and  unselfish  concern  for  the  sex-partner  and  her  wel- 
fare. When  I  advise  a  man  to  resist  and  suppress  and  destroy 
the  impulse  toward  lust  in  his  nature,  I  am  not  telling  him 
to  live  a  sexless  life.  P I  am  telling  him  that  if  he  represses 
lust,  then  love  will  come;  whereas,  if  he  yields  to  lust,  then 
love  may  never  come,  he  may  make  himself  incapable  of  love, 


The  Book  of  Love  49 

incapable  of  feeling  it  or  of  trusting  it,  or  of  inspiring  it  in 
a  woman.  And  I  say  that  if,  on  the  other  hand,  he  resists 
lust,  he  will  pour  all  the  energies  of  his  being  into  the  chan- 
nels of  affection  and  idealism.  Instead  of  having  his  thoughts 
diverted  by  every  passing  female  form,  his  energies  will  be- 
come concentrated  upon  the  search  for  one  woman  who 
appeals  to  him  in  permanent  and  useful  ways.  We  may  be 
sure  that  nature  has  not  made  men  and  women  incompatible, 
but  on  the  contrary,  has  provided  for  fulfillment  of  the  desires 
of  both.  The  man  will  find  some  woman  who  is  looking 
for  the  thing  which  he  has  to  offer — ^that  is,  lov£^ 

And  now,  what  about  the  suppression  of  love?  Here  I 
am  willing  to  go  as  far  as  any  physician  could  desire,  and 
possibly  farther.  Speaking  generally,  and  concerning  nor- 
mal adult  human  beings,  I  say  that  the  suppression  of  love 
is  a  crime  against  nature  and  life.  I  say  that  long  continued 
and  systematic  suppression  of  love  exercises  a  devastating 
effect,  not  merely  upon  the  body,  but  upon  the  mind  and  all 
the  energies  of  the  being.  I  say  that  the  doctrine  of  the  sup- 
pression of  love,  no  matter  by  whom  it  is  preached,  is  an 
affront  to  nature  and  to  life,  and  an  insult  to  the  creator  of 
life.  I  say  that  it  is  the  duty  of  all  men  and  women,  not 
merely  to  assert  their  own  right  to  love,  but  to  devote  their 
energies  to  a  war  upon  whatever  ideas  and  conventions  and 
laws  in  society  deny  the  love-right. 

The  belief  that  long  continued  suppression  of  love  does 
grave  harm  has  been  strongly  reinforced  in  the  last  few  years 
by  the  discovery  of  psycho-analysis,  a  science  which  enables 
us  to  explofe  our  unconscious  minds,  and  lay  bare  the  secrets 
of  nature's  psychic  workshop.  These  revelations  have  made 
plain  that  sex  plays  an  even  more  important  part  in  our  men- 
tal lives  than  we  realized.  Sex  feeling  manifests  itself,  not 
merely  in  grown  people,  but  in  the  tiniest  infants;  in  these 
latter  it  has  of  course  no  object  in  the  opposite  sex,  but  the 
physical  sensations  are  there,  and  some  of  their  outward  mani- 
festations; and  as  the  infant  grows,  and  realizes  the  outside 
world,  the  feelings  come  to  center  upon  others,  the  parents 
first  of  all.  These  manifestations  must  be  guided,  and  some- 
times repressed;  but  if  this  is  done  violently,  by  means  of 
terror,  the  consequences  may  be  very  harmful — ^the  wrong 
impulses  or  the  terrors  may  survive  as  a  "complex"  in  the 
unconscious  mind,  and  cause  a  long  chain  of  nervous  disorders 


50  Love  and  Society 

and  physical  weaknesses  in  the  adult.  These  things  are  no 
matter  of  guesswork,  they  have  been  proven  as  thoroughly 
as  any  scientific  discovery,  and  are  used  in  a  new  technic  of 
healing.  Of  course,  as  with  every  new  theory,  there  are 
unbalanced  people  who  carry  it  to  extremes.  There  are 
fanatics  of  Freudianism  who  talk  as  if  everything  in  the 
human  unconsciousness  were  sex;  but  that  need  not  blind  us 
to  the  importance  of  these  new  jliscoveries,  and  the  confir- 
mation they  bring  to  the  thesis  [that  sane  and  normal  love, 
wisely  guided  by  common  sense  and  reasoned  knowledge,  is 
at  a  certain  period  of  life  a  vital  necessity  to  every  sound 
human  being/} 


CHAPTER  XXXVII 

CELIBACY  VERSUS  CHASTITY 

(The  ideal  of  the  repression  of  the  sex  impulse,  as  against  the 
ideal  of  its  guidance  and  cultivation.) 

There  are  two  words  which  we  need  in  this  discussion, 
and  as  they  are  generally  used  loosely,  they  must  now  be 
defined  precisely.  The  two  words  are  celibacy  and  chastity. 
We  define  celibacy  as  the  permanent  and  systematic  suppres- 
sion of  love.  We  define  chastity,  on  the  other  hand,  as  the 
permanent  and  systematic  suppression  of  lust.  Chastity,  as 
the  word  is  here  used,  is  not  a  denial  of  love,  but  a  preparing 
for  it;  it  is  the  practice  and  the  ideal,  necessary  especially 
in  the  young,  of  consecrating  their  beings  to  the  search  for  love, 
and  to  becoming  worthy  for  love.  In  that  sense  we  regard 
chastity  as  one  of  the  most  essential  of  virtues  in  the  young. 
It  is  widely  taught  today,  but  ineffectively,  because  unintel- 
ligently  and  without  discrimination;  because,  in  other  words, 
it  is  confused  with  celibacy,  which  is  a  perversion  of  life,  and 
one  of  humanity's  intellectual  and  moral  diseases. 

The  origin  of  the  ideal  of  celibacy  is  easy  to  understand. 
At  a  certain  stage  in  human  development  the  eyes  of  the  mind 
are  opened,  and  to  some  man  comes  a  revelation  of  the  life 
of  altruism  and  sympathetic  imagination.  To  use  the  com- 
mon phrase,  the  man  discovers  his  spiritual  nature.  But  under 
the  conditions  then  prevailing,  all  the  world  outside  him  is 
in  a  conspiracy  to  strangle  that  nature,  to  drag  it  down  and 
trample  it  into  the  mire.  One  of  the  most  powerful  of  these 
destructive  agencies,  as  it  seems  to  the  man,  is  sex.  By 
means  of  sex  he  is  laid  hold  upon  by  strange  and  terrible 
creatures  who  do  not  understand  his  higher  vision,  but  seek 
only  to  prey  upon  him,  and  use  him  for  their  convenience. 
At  the  worst  they  rob  him  of  everything,  money,  health,  time 
and  reputation;  at  best,  they  saddle  him  and  bridle  him,  they 
put  him  in  harness  and  set  him  to  dragging  a  heavy  load.  In 
the  words  of  a  wise  old  man  of  the  world,  Francis  Bacon, 
"He  who  marries  and  has  children  gives  hostages  to  fortune." 
In  a  world  wherein  war,  pestilence,  and  famine  held  sway, 

61 


52  Love  and  Society 

the  man  of  family  had  but  slight  chance  of  surviving  as  a 
philosopher  or  prophet  or  saint.  Discovering  in  himself  a 
deep-rooted  and  overwhelming  impulse  to  fall  into  this  snare, 
he  imagined  a  devil  working  in  his  heart;  so  he  fled  away 
to  the  desert,  and  hid  in  a  cave,  and  starved  himself,  and 
lashed  himself  with  whips,  and  allowed  worms  and  lice  to 
devour  his  body,  in  the  effort  to  destroy  in  himself  the 
impulse  of  sex. 

So  the  world  had  monasteries,  and  a  religious  culture, 
not  of  much  use,  but  better  than  nothing;  and  so  we  still  have 
in  the  world  celibate  priesthoods,  and  what  is  more  danger- 
ous to  our  social  health,  we  have  the  old,  degraded  notions 
of  the  essential  vileness  of  the  sex  relationship — notions  per- 
meating all  our  thought,  our  literature,  our  social  conventions 
and  laws,  making  it  impossible  for  us  to  attain  true  wisdom 
and  health  and  happiness  in  love. 

I  say  the  ideal  of  celibacy  is  an  intellectual  and  moral 
disease ;  it  is  a  violation  of  nature,  and  nature  devotes  all  her 
energies  to  breaking  it  down,  and  she  always  succeeds.  There 
never  has  been  a  celibate  religious  order,  no  matter  how  noble 
its  origin  and  how  strict  its  discipline,  which  has  not  sooner 
or  later  become  a  breeding  place  of  loathsome  unnatural 
vices.  And  sooner  or  later  the  ideal  begins  to  weaken,  and 
common  vSense  to  take  its  place,  and  so  we  read  in  history 
about  popes  who  had  sons,  and  we  see  about  us  priests  who 
have  "nieces"  and  attractive  servant  girls.  Make  the  acquain- 
tance of  any  police  sergeant  in  any  big  city  of  America,  and 
get  him  to  chatting  on  friendly  terms,  and  you  will  discover 
that  it  is  a  common  experience  for  the  police  in  their  raids 
upon  brothels  to  catch  the  representatives  of  celibate  religious 
orders.  As  one  old-timer  in  the  "Tenderloin"  of  New  York 
said  to  me,  "Of  course,  we  don't  make  any  trouble  for  the 
good  fathers."  Nor  was  this  merely  because  the  old  sergeant 
was  an  Irishman  and  a  Catholic;  it  was  because  deep  down 
in  his  heart  he  knew,  as  every  man  knows,  that  the  craving 
of  a  man  for  the  society  and  companionship  of  a  woman  is 
an  overwhelming  craving,  which  will  break  down  every  bar- 
rier that  society  may  set  against  it. 

There  is  another  form  of  celibacy  which  is  not  based  upon 
religious  ideas,  but  is  economic  in  its  origin,  and  purely 
selfish  in  its  nature.  It  is  unorganized  and  unreasoned,  and 
is  known  as  "bachelorhood";  it  has  as  its  complements  the 


The  Book  of  Love  68 

institutions  of  old  maidenhood  and  of  prostitution.  Both 
forms  of  celibacy,  the  religious  and  the  economic,  are  entirely 
incompatible  with  chastity,  which  is  only  possible  where  love 
is  recognized  and  honored.  Chastity  is  a  preparation  for  love ; 
and  if  you  forbid  love,  whether  by  law,  or  by  social  conven- 
tion, or  by  economic  strangling,  you  at  once  make  chastity  a 
Utopian  dream.  You  may  preach  it  from  your  pulpits  until 
you  are  black  in  the  face;  you  may  call  out  your  Billy  Sun- 
days to  rave,  and  dance,  and  go  into  convulsions;  you  may 
threaten  hell-fire  and  brimstone  until  you  throw  whole  audi- 
ences into  spasms — but  you  will  never  make  them  chaste.  On 
the  contrary,  strange  and  horrible  as  it  may  seem,  those  very 
excitements  will  turn  into  sexual  excitements  before  your 
eyes!  So  subtle  is  our  ancient  mother  nature,  and  so  deter- 
mined to  have  her  own  way ! 

The  abominable  old  ideal  of  celibacy,  with  its  hatred  of 
womanhood,  its  distrust  of  happiness,  its  terror  of  devils, 
is  not  yet  dead  in  the  world.  It  is  in  our  very  bones,  and 
is  forever  appearing  in  new  and  supposed  to  be  modern  forms. 
Take  a  man  like  Tolstoi,  who  gained  enormous  influence,  not 
merely  in  Russia,  but  throughout  the  world  among  people  who 
think  themselves  liberal — humanitarians,  pacifists,  philosophic 
anarchists.  Tolstoi's  notions  about  sex,  his  teachings  and 
writings  and  likewise  his  behavior  toward  it,  were  one  con- 
tinuous manifestation  of  disease.  All  through  his  youth  and 
middle  years,  as  an  army  officer,  popular  novelist,  and  darling 
of  the  aristocracy,  his  life  was  one  of  license,  and  the  attitude 
toward  women  he  thus  acquired,  he  never  got  out  of  his 
thoughts  to  his  last  day.  Gorky,  meeting  him  in  his  old  age, 
reports  his  conversation  as  unpleasantly  obscene,  and  his  whole 
attitude  toward  women  one  of  furtive  and  unwholesome  sly- 
ness. 

But  Tolstoi  was  in  other  ways  a  great  soul,  one  of  the 
great  moral  consciences  of  humanity.  He  looked  about  him 
at  a  world  gone  mad  with  greed  and  hate,  and  he  made  con- 
vulsive efforts  to  reform  his  own  spirit  and  escape  the  power 
of  evil.  As  regards  sex,  his  thought  took  the  form  of  ancient 
Christian  celibacy.  Man  must  repudiate  the  physical  side  of 
sex,  he  must  learn  to  feel  toward  women  a  "pure"  affection, 
the  relationship  of  brother  and  sister.  In  his  novel,  "Resur- 
rection," Tolstoi  portrays  a  young  aristocrat  who  meets  a 
beautiful  peasant  girl  and  conceives  for  her  such  a  noble  and 

6 


54  Love  and  Society 

generous  emotion;  but  gradually  the  poison  of  physical  sex- 
desire  steals  into  his  mind,  he  seduces  her,  and  she  becomes 
a  prostitute.  Later  in  life,  when  he  discovers  the  crime  he 
has  committed,  he  humbles  himself  and  follows  her  into  exile, 
and  wins  her  to  God  and  goodness  by  the  unselfish  and  un- 
sexual  love  which  he  should  have  maintained  from  the  begin- 
ning. 

It  was  Tolstoi's  teaching  that  all  men  should  aspire  toward 
this  kind  of  love,  and  when  it  was  pointed  out  to  him  that  if 
this  doctrine  were  to  be  applied  universally,  the  human  race 
would  become  extinct,  his  answer  was  that  there  was  no  rea- 
son to  fear  that,  because  only  a  few  people  would  be  good 
enough  and  strong  enough  to  follow  the  right  ideal !  Here 
you  see  the  reincarnation  of  the  old  Christian  notion  that  we 
are  "conceived  in  sin  and  born  in  iniquity."  We  may  be  pure 
and  good,  and  cease  to  exist;  or  we  may  sin,  and  let  life 
continue.  Some  choose  to  sin,  and  these  sinners  hand 
down  their  sinful  qualities  to  the  future;  and  so  virtue 
and  goodness  remain  what  they  have  always  been,  a  futile 
crying  out  in  the  wilderness  by  a  few  religious  prophets,  whom 
God  has  sent  to  call  down  destruction  upon  a  world  which 
He  had  made — ^through  some  mistake  never  satisfactorily 
explained ! 

It  is  easy  nowadays  to  persuade  intelligent  people  to  laugh 
at  such  a  perverted  view  of  life;  but  the  truth  is  that  this 
attitude  toward  sex  is  written,  not  merely  into  our  religious 
creeds  and  formulas,  but  into  most  of  our  laws  and  social 
conventions.  It  is  this,  which  for  convenience  I  will  call  the 
"monkish"  view  of  love,  which  prevents  our  dealing  frankly 
and  honestly  with  its  problems,  distinguishing  between  v/hat 
is  wrong  and  what  is  right,  and  doing  anything  effective  to 
remedy  the  evils  of  marriage-plus-prostitution.  That  is  why 
I  have  tried  so  carefully  to  draw  the  distinction  between  what 
I  call  love  and  what  I  call  lust ;  between  the  ideal  of  celibacy, 
which  is  a  perversion,  and  the  idea  of  chastity,  which  must 
form  an  essential  part  of  any  regimen  of  true  and  enduring 
love. 


CHAPTER  XXXVIII 
THE  DEFENSE  OF  LOVE 

(Discusses  passionate  love,  its  sanction,  its  place  in  life,  and 
its  preservation  in  marriage.) 

I  have  before  me  as  I  write  a  newspaper  article  by  Robert 
Blatchford,  a  great  writer  and  great  man.  He  is  dealing 
with  the  subject  of  "Love  and  Marriage,"  and  his  doctrine  is 
summed  up  in  the  following  sentences :  "There  is  a  difference 
between  loving  a  woman  and  falling  in  love  with  her.  The 
love  one  falls  into  is  a  sweet  illusion.  But  that  fragrant  dream 
does  not  last.    In  marriage  there  are  no  fairies." 

This  expresses  one  of  the  commonest  ideas  in  the  world. 
Passionate  love  is  one  thing,  and  marriage  is  another  and 
different  thing,  and  it  is  no  more  possible  to  reconcile  them 
than  to  mix  oil  and  water.  Our  notions  of  "romantic"  love 
took  their  rise  in  the  Middle  Ages,  from  the  songs  and  nar- 
ratives of  the  troubadours,  and  this  whole  tradition  was  based 
upon  the  glorification  of  illegitimate  and  extra-marital  love. 
That  tradition  has  ruled  the  world  of  art  ever  since,  and  rules 
it  today.  I  do  not  exaggerate  when  I  say  that  it  is  the  con- 
ventional view  of  grand  opera  and  the  drama,  of  moving  pic- 
tures and  novels,  that  impassioned  and  thrilling  love  is  found 
before  marriage,  and  is  found  in  adultery  and  in  temptations 
to  adultery,  but  is  never  found  in  marriage.  I  have  a  pretty 
varied  acquaintance  with  the  literature  of  the  world,  and  I 
have  sat  and  thought  for  quite  a  while,  without  being  able  to 
recall  a  single  portrait  of  life  which  contradicts  this  thesis; 
and  certainly  anyone  familiar  with  literature  could  name  ten 
thousand  novels  and  dramas  and  grand  operas  which  support 
the  thesis. 

English  and  American  Puritanism  have  beaten  the  tradi- 
tion down  to  this  extent :  the  novelist  portrays  the  glories  and 
thrills  of  young  love,  and  carries  it  as  far  as  the  altar  and 
the  orange  blossoms  and  white  ribbons  and  showers  of  rice 
— and  stops.  He  leaves  you  to  assume  that  this  delightful 
rapture  continues  forever  after;  but  he  does  not  attempt  to 
show  it  to  you — he  would  not  dare  attempt  to  show  it,  because 

55 


56  Love  and  Society 

the  general  experience  of  men  and  women  in  marriage  would 
make  him  ridiculous.  So  he  runs  away  from  the  issue;  if 
he  tells  you  a  story  of  married  life,  it  is  a  story  of  a  "triangle" 
— ^the  thrills  of  love  imperiling  marriage,  and  either  crushed 
out,  or  else  wrecking  the  lives  of  the  victims.  Such  is  the 
unanimous  testimony  of  all  our  arts  today,  and  I  submit  it 
as  evidence  of  the  fact  that  there  must  be  something  vitally 
wrong  with  our  marriage  system. 

Personally,  I  am  prepared  to  go  as  far  as  the  extreme 
sex-radical  in  the  defense  of  love  and  the  right  to  love.  I 
believe  that  love  is  the  most  precious  of  all  the  gifts  of  life. 
I  accept  its  sanctions  and  its  authority.  I  believe  that  it  is 
to  be  cherished  and  obeyed,  and  not  to  be  run  away  from  or 
strangled  in  the  heart.  I  believe  that  it  is  the  voice  of  nature 
speaking  in  the  depths  of  us,  and  speaking  from  a  wisdom 
deeper  than  we  have  yet  attained,  or  may  attain  for  many 
centuries  to  come.  And  when  I  say  love,  I  do  not  mean 
merely  affection.  I  do  not  mean  merely  the  habit  of  living 
in  the  same  home,  which  is  the  basis  of  marriage  as  Blatch- 
ford  describes  it.  What  I  mean  is  the  love  of  the  poets  and 
the  dreamers,  the  "young  love"  which  is  thrill  and  ecstasy,  a 
glorification  and  a  transfiguration  of  the  whole  of  life.  [^I  say 
that,  far  from  giving  up  this  love  for  marriage,  it  is  the  true 
purpose  of  marriage  to  preserve  this  love  and  perpetuate  itj 

r"  To  save  repetition  and  waste  of  words,  let  us  agree  that 
from  now  on  when  I  use  the  word  love,  I  mean  the  passion- 
ate love  of  those  who  are  "in  love."  I  believe  that  it  is  the 
right  of  men  and  women  to  be  "in  love,"  and  Jthat  there  is  no 
true  marriage  unless  they  are  "in  love,"  and  stay  "in  love." 
I  believe  that  it  is  possible  to  apply  reason  to  love,  to  learn 
to  understand  love  and  the  ways  of  love,  to  protect  it  and 
keep  it  alive  in  marriage.  Blatchford  writes  the  sentence, 
"Matrimony  cannot  be  all  honeymoon."  I  answer  that  as- 
suredly it  can  be,  and  if  you  ask  me  how  I  know,  I  tell  you 
that  I  know  in  the  only  way  we  really  know  anything — 
because  I  have  proven  it  in  my  own  life.  I  say  that  if  men 
and  women  would  recognize  the  perpetuation  of  the  honey- 
moon as  the  purpose  of  marriage,  and  would  devote  to  that 
end  one-hundredth  part  of  the  intelligence  and  energy  they 
now  devote  to  the  killing  of  their  fellow  human  beings  in 
war,  we  might  have  an  end  to  the  wretched  "romantic  tradi- 
tion" which  makes  the  most  sacred  emotion  of  the  human 


The  Book  of  Love  67 

heart  into  a  sneak-thief  skulking  in  the  darkness,  entering 
our  lives  by  back  alleys  and  secret  stairways — while  greed 
and  worldly  pomp,  dullness  and  boredom,  parade  in  by  the 
front  entrance--,  / 

In  the  first  ^  place,  what  is  love — young  love,  passionate 
love,  the  love  of  those  who  "fall  in"  ?  I  know  a  certain  lady, 
well  versed  in  worldly  affairs,  who  says  that  it  is  at  once 
the  greatest  nonsense  and  the  deadliest  snare  in  the  world. 
This  lady  was  trained  as  a  "coquette" ;  she,  and  all  the  young 
ladies  she  knew,  made  it  their  business  to  cause  men  to  fall 
in  love  with  them,  and  their  prestige  was  based  upon  their 
skill  in  that  art.  So  to  them  "love"  was  a  joke,  and  men 
"in  love"  were  victims,  whether  ridiculous  or  pitiable.  To 
this  I  answer  that  I  know  nothing  in  life  that  cannot  be 
"faked" ;  but  an  imitation  has  value  only  as  it  resembles  some- 
thing that  is  real,  and  that  has  real  value. 

I  am  aware  that  it  is  possible  for  a  society  to  be  so  cor- 
rupted, so  given  up  to  the  admiration  of  imitations,  of  the 
paint  and  powder  and  silk-stocking-clad-ankle  kind  of  love, 
that  true  and  genuine  love  interest,  with  its  impulse  to  self- 
sacrifice  and  self-consecration,  is  no  longer  felt  or  under- 
stood. I  am  aware  that  in  such  a  society  it  is  possible  for 
even  the  very  young  to  be  so  sophisticated  that  what  they 
take  to  be  love  is  merely  vanity,  the  worship  of  money,  and 
the  grace  and  charm  which  the  possession  of  money  confers. 
I  have  known  girls  who  were  "head  over  heels"  in  love,  and 
thought  it  was  with  a  man,  when  quite  clearly  they  were  in 
love  with  a  dress  suit  or  a  social  position.  In  such  a  society 
it  is  hard  to  talk  about  natural  emotions,  and  deep  and  abid- 
ing and  disinterested  affections. 

Nevertheless,  amid  all  the  false  conventions,  the  sham 
glories  and  cowardices  of  our  civilization,  there  abides  in  the 
heart  the  craving  for  true  love,  and  the  idea  of  it  leaps  con- 
tinually into  flame  in  the  young.  In  spite  of  the  ridicule  of 
the  elders,  in  spite  of  blunders  and  tragic  failures,  in  spite 
of  dishonesties  and  deceptions — nevertheless,  it  continues  to 
happen  that  out  of  a  thousand  maidens  the  youth  finds  one 
whose  presence  thrills  him  with  a  new  and  terrible  emotion, 
whose  lightest  touch  makes  him  shiver,  almost  makes  his  knees 
give  way. 

If  you  will  recall  what  I  have  written  about  instinct  and 
reason,  you  will  know  that  I  am  not  a  blind  worshipper  of 


58  Love  and  Society 

our  ancient  mother  nature.  I  am  not  humble  in  my  attitude 
toward  her,  but  perfectly  willing  to  say  when  I  know  more 
than  she  does.  On  the  other  hand,  when  I  know  nothing  or 
next  to  nothing,  I  am  shy  of  contradicting  my  ancient  mother, 
and  disposed  to  give  respectful  heed  to  her  promptings.  One 
of  the  things  about  which  we  know  almost  nothing  at  present 
is  the  subject  of  eugenics.  We  are  only  at  the  beginning  of 
trying  to  find  out  what  matings  produce  the  best  offspring. 
Meantime,  we  ought  to  consider  those  indications  which  nature 
gives  us,  just  as  we  consider  her  advice  about  what  food  to 
eat  and  what  rest  to  take. 

It  is  not  my  idea  that  science  will  ever  take  men  and 
women  and  marry  them  in  cold  blood,  as  today  we  breed 
our  cattle.  What  I  think  will  happen  is  that  young  men  and 
women  will  meet  one  another,  as  they  do  at  present,  and  will 
find  the  love  impulse  awakening;  they  will  then  submit  their 
love  to  investigation,  as  to  whether  they  should  follow  that 
impulse,  or  should  wait.  In  other  words,  I  do  not  believe 
that  science  will  ever  do  away  with  the  raptures  of  love,  but 
will  make  itself  the  servant  of  these  raptures,  finding  out 
what  they  mean,  and  how  their  precious  essence  may  be 
preserved. 

I  perfectly  understand  that  the  begetting  of  children  is  not 
the  only  purpose  of  love.  The  children  have  to  be  reared  and 
trained,  which  means  that  a  home  has  to  be  founded,  and 
the  parents  have  to  learn  to  co-operate.  They  have  to  have 
common  aims  in  life,  and  temperaments  sufficiently  harmo- 
nious so  that  they  can  live  in  the  house  together  without  tear- 
ing each  other's  eyes  out.  This  means  that  in  any  civilized 
society  all  impulses  of  love  have  to  be  subjected  to  severe 
criticism.  I  intend,  before  long,  to  show  just  how  I  think 
parents  and  guardians  should  co-operate  with  young  people  in 
love;  to  help  them  to  understand  in  advance  what  they  are 
doing,  and  how  it  may  be  possible  for  them  to  make  their  love 
permanent  and  successful.  For  the  moment  I  merely  state, 
to  avoid  any  possible  misunderstanding,  that  I  am  the  last 
person  in  the  world  to  favor  what  is  called  "blind"  love,  the 
unthinking  abandonment  to  an  impulse  of  sex  passion.  What 
I  am  trying  to  show  is  that  the  passionate  impulse,  the  pas- 
sionate excitement  of  the  young  couple,  is  the  material  out 
of  which  love  and  marriage  are  made.  Passion  is  a  part  of 
us,  and  a  fundamental  part.    If  we  do  not  find  a  place  for  it 


The  Book  of  Love  59 

in  marriage,  it  will  seek  satisfaction  outside  of  marriage,  and 
that  means  lying,  or  the  wrecking  of  the  marriage,  or  both. 

Passion  is  what  gives  to  love  and  marriage  its  vitality, 
its  energy,  its  drive;  in  fact,  it  gives  these  qualities  to  the 
whole  character.  It  is  a  vivifying  force,  transfiguring  the 
personality,  and  if  it  is  crushed  and  repressed,  the  whole 
life  of  that  person  is  distorted.  Yet  it  is  a  fact  which 
every  physician  knows,  that  millions  of  women  marry  and 
live  their  whole  lives  without  ever  knowing  what  passionate 
gratification  is.  As  a  consequence  of  this,  millions  of  men 
take  it  for  granted  that  there  are  "good"  women  and  "bad" 
women,  and  that  only  the  latter  are  interesting.  This,  of 
course,  is  simply  one  of  the  abnormalities  caused  by  the  sup- 
planting of  love  by  money  as  a  motive  in  marriage.  Love 
becomes  a  superfluity  and  a  danger,  and  all  the  forces  of 
society,  including  institutionalized  religion,  combine  to  outlaw 
it  and  drive  it  underground.  Or  we  might  say  that  they  lock 
it  in  a  dungeon — and  that  the  supreme  delight  of  all  the 
painters,  poets,  musicians,  dramatists  and  novelists  of  all  climes 
and  all  periods  of  history,  is  to  portray  the  escape  of  the 
"young  god"  from  these  imj)risonments.  The  story  is  told 
in  six  words  of  an  old  English  ballad:  "Love  will  find  out 
the  way!" 

Is  it  not  obvious  that  there  must  be  something  vitally 
wrong  with  our  institutions  and  conventions  in  matters  of  sex, 
when  here  exists  this  eternal  war  between  our  moralists  and 
our  artists?  Why  not  make  up  our  minds  what  we  really 
believe ;  whether  it  is  true  that  poets  are,  as  Shelley  said,  "the 
unacknowledged  legislators  of  mankind,"  or  whether  they  are, 
as  Plato  declared,  false  teachers  and  seducers  of  the  young. 
If  they  are  the  latter,  let  us  have  done  with  them,  let  us  drive 
them  from  the  state,  together  with  lovers  and  all  other  impas- 
sioned persons.  But  if,  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  truth  the 
poets  tell  about  life,  then  let  us  take  the  young  god  out  of  his 
dungeon,  and  bring  him  into  our  homes  by  the  front  door, 
and  cast  out  the  false  gods  of  vanity  and  greed  and  worldly 
prestige  which  now  sit  in  his  place. 


CHAPTER  XXXIX 

BIRTH  CONTROL 

(Deals  with  the  prevention  of  conception  as  one  of  the  great- 
est of  man's  discoveries,  releasing  him  from  nature's  enslavement, 
and  placing  the  keys  of  life  in  his  hands.) 

I  assume  that  you  have  followed  my  argument,  and  are 
prepared  to  consider  seriously  whether  it  may  be  possible  to 
establish  love  in  marriage  as  the  sex  institution  of  civilized 
society.  If  you  really  wish  to  bring  such  an  institution  into 
existence,  the  first  thing  you  have  to  do  is  to  accomplish  the 
social  revolution;  that  is,  you  must  wipe  out  class  control  of 
society,  and  prestige  based  upon  money  exploitation.  But 
that  is  a  vast  change,  and  will  take  time,  and  meanwhile  we 
have  to  live,  and  wish  to  live  with  as  little  misery  as  possible. 
So  the  practical  question  becomes  this:  Suppose  that  you,  as 
an  individual,  wish  to  find  as  much  happiness  in  love  as  may 
now  be  possible,  what  counsel  have  I  to  offer?  If  you  are 
young,  you  wish  this  advice  for  yourself ;  while  if  you  are 
mature,  you  wish  it  for  your  children.  I  will  put  my  advice 
under  four  heads:  First,  marriage  for  love;  second,  birth 
control ;  third,  early  marriage ;  fourth,  education  for  marriage. 

The  first  of  these  we  have  considered  at  some  length.  A 
part  of  the  process  of  social  revolution  is  personal  conver- 
sion; the  giving  up  by  every  individual  of  the  worldly  ideal, 
Che  surrender  of  luxury  and  self-indulgence,  the  consecrating 
of  one's  life  to  self  education  and  the  cause  of  social  justice. 
And  do  not  think  that  that  is  an  easy  thing,  or  an  unimpor- 
tant thing,  a  thing  to  be  taken  for  granted.  On  the  contrary, 
it  is  something  that  most  of  us  have  to  struggle  with  at  every 
hour  of  our  lives,  because  respect  for  property  and  worldly 
conventions  has  become  one  of  our  deepest  instincts;  our 
whole  society  is  poisoned  with  it,  and  I  can  count  on  the 
fingers  of  one  hand  the  people  I  have  known  in  my  life  who 
have  completely  escaped  from  it.  It  is  not  merely  a  question 
of  refusing  to  marry  except  for  love,lit  is  a  question  of  refus- 
ing to  lo-^'e  except  for  honest  and  worthy  qualities^  It  is  a 
question  of  saving  our  children  from  the  damnable  forces  of 

60 


The  Book  of  Love  61 

snobbery,  which  lay  siege  to  their  young  minds  and  destroy 
the  best  impulses  of  their  hearts,  while  we  in  our  blindness 
are  still  thinking  of  them  as  babies. 

r  Of  the  other  three  topics  that  I  have  suggested,  I  begin 
with  birth  control,  because  it  is  the  most  fundamental  and 
most  important.  Without  birth  control  there  can  be  no  free- 
dom, no  happiness,  no  permanence  in  love,  and  there  can  be 
no  mastery  of  life.  Birth  control  is  one  of  the  great  funda- 
mental achievements  of  the  human  reason,  as  important  to  the 
life  of  mankind  as  the  discovery  of  fire  or  the  invention  of 
printing.  Birth  control  is  the  deliverance  of  womankind,  and 
therefore  of  mankind  also,  from  the  blind  and  insane  fecun- 
dity of  nature,  which  created  us  animals,  and  would  keep  us 
animals  forever  if  we  did  not  rebel, j 

Ever  since  the  dawn  of  history,  and  probably  for  long 
ages  before  that,  our  race  has  been  struggling  against  this 
blind  insanity  of  nature.  Poor,  bewildered  Theodore  Roose- 
velt stormed  at  what  he  called  "race  suicide,"  thinking  it  was 
some  brand  new  and  terrible  modern  corruption ;  but  nowhere 
do  we  find  a  primitive  tribe,  nowhere  in  history  do  we  find 
a  race  which  did  not  seek  to  save  itself  from  overgrowth 
and  consequent  starvation.  They  did  not  know  enough  to 
prevent  conception,  but  they  did  the  best  they  could  by  means 
of  abortion  and  infanticide.  And  because  today  superstition 
keeps  the  priceless  knowledge  of  contraception  from  the  vast 
majority  of  women,  these  crude,  savage  methods  still  prevail, 
and  we  have  our  million  abortions  a  year  in  the  United  States. 
Assuming  that  something  near  one-fourth  our  population  con- 
sists of  women  capable  of  bearing  children,  we  have  one 
woman  in  twenty-five  going  through  this  agonizing  and  health- 
wrecking  experience  every  year.  They  go  through  with  it, 
you  understand,  regardless  of  everything — all  the  moralists 
and  preachers  and  priests  with  their  hell  fire  and  brimstone. 
They  go  through  with  it  because  we  have  both  marriage  with- 
out love,  and  love  without  marriage;  also  because  we  permit 
some  ten  or  twenty  per  cent  of  our  total  population  to  suffer 
the  pangs  of  perpetual  starvation,  because  more  than  half  our 
farms  are  mortgaged  or  occupied  by  tenants,  and  some  ten  or 
twenty  per  cent  of  our  workers  are  out  of  jobs  all  the  time. 
Some  of  our  women  know  about  birth  control.  They  are 
the  rich  women,  who  get  what  they  want  in  this  world.  They 
object  to  the  humiliations  and  inconveniences  of  child  bearing. 


62  Love  and  Society 

and  some  of  them  raise  one  or  two  children,  and  others  of 
them  raise  poodle  dogs.  Also,  our  middle  classes  have  found 
out;  our  doctors  and  lawyers  and  college  professors,  and  peo- 
ple of  that  sort.  But  we  deliberately  keep  the  knowledge 
from  our  foreign  populations,  by  the  terrors  which  the  church 
has  at  its  command.  And  what  is  the  practical  consequence 
of  this  procedure  ?  It  is  that  while  all  our  Anglo-Saxon  stock, 
those  who  founded  our  country  and  established  its  institutions, 
are  gradually  removing  themselves  from  the  face  of  the  earth, 
our  ignorant  and  helpless  populations,  whether  in  city  slums 
or  on  tenant  farms,  are  multiplying  like  rabbits.  Read  Jack 
London's  "The  Valley  of  the  Moon"  and  see  what  is  happen- 
ing in  California.  You  will  find  the  same  thing  happening 
in  any  portion  of  the  United  States  where  you  take  the  trouble 
to  use  your  own  eyes. 

Now,  I  try  to  repress  such  impulses  toward  race  prejudice 
as  I  find  in  myself.  I  am  willing  to  admit  for  the  sake  of 
this  argument  that  in  the  course  of  time  all  the  races  that  are 
now  swarming  in  America,  Portuguese  and  Japanese  and 
Mexican  and  French-Canadian  and  Polish  and  Hungarian  and 
Slovakian,  are  capable  of  just  as  high  intellectual  development 
as  our  ancestors  who  wrote  the  Declaration  of  Independence. 
But  no  one  who  sees  the  conditions  under  which  they  now 
live  can  deny  that  it  will  take  a  good  deal  of  labor,  teaching 
them  and  training  them,  as  well  as  scrubbing  them,  to  accom- 
plish that  result.  And  what  a  waste  of  energy,  what  a  farce 
it  makes  of  culture,  to  take  the  people  who  have  already  been 
scrubbed  and  taught  and  trained  for  self-government,  and 
exterminate  them,  and  raise  up  others  in  their  place !  It  seems 
time  that  we  gave  thought  to  the  fundamental  question,  wheth- 
er or  not  there  is  something  self-destroying  in  the  very  process 
of  culture.  Unless  we  can  answer  this  we  might  as  well  give 
up  our  visions  and  our  efforts  to  lift  the  race. 

Theodore  Roosevelt  stormed  at  birth  control  for  something 
like  ten  years,  and  it  would  be  interesting  if  we  could  know 
how  many  Anglo-Saxon  babies  he  succeeded  in  bringing  into 
the  world  by  his  preachments.  If  what  he  wanted  was  to 
correct  the  balance  between  native  and  foreign  births,  how 
much  more  sensible  to  have  taught  birth  control  to  those  poor, 
pathetic,  half-starved  and  overworked  foreign  mothers  of  our 
slums  and  tenant  farms!  I  can  wager  that  for  every  Anglo- 
Saxon  baby  that  Theodore  Roosevelt  brought  into  the  world 


The  Book  of  Love  63 

by  his  preachings,  he  could  have  kept  out  ten  thousand  foreign 
slum  babies,  if  only  he  had  lent  his  aid  to  Margaret  Sanger! 

Ah,  but  he  wanted  all  the  babies  to  be  bom,  you  say! 
I  see  before  me  the  face  of  a  certain  devout  old  Christian 
lady,  known  to  me,  who  settles  the  question  by  the  Bible 
quotation,  "Be  fruitful  and  multiply."  But  what  avails  it  to 
follow  this  biblical  advice,  if  we  allow  one  out  of  five  of  the 
new-born  infants  to  perish  from  lack  of  scientific  care  before 
they  are  two  years  old?  What  avails  it  if  we  send  them  to 
school  hungry,  as  we  do  twenty-two  per  cent  of  the  public 
school  children  of  New  York  City?  What  avails  it  if  we 
allow  venereal  disease  to  spread,  so  that  a  large  percentage  of 
the  babies  are  deformed  and  miserable?  What  avails  it  if, 
when  they  are  fully  grown,  we  can  think  of  nothing  better 
to  do  with  them  than  to  take  them  by  millions  at  a  time  and 
dress  them  up  in  uniforms  and  send  them  out  to  be  destroyed 
by  poison  gases?  Would  it  not  be  the  part  of  common  sense 
to  establish  universal  birth  control  for  at  least  a  year  or  two 
— until  we  have  learned  to  take  care  of  our  newly  born  babies, 
and  to  feed  our  school  children,  and  to  protect  our  youths 
from  vice,  and  to  abolish  poverty  and  war  from  the  earth? 

These  are  the  social  aspects  of  birth  control.  There  are 
also  to  be  considered  what  I  might  call  the  personal  aspects 
of  it.  Because  young  people  do  not  know  about  it,  and  have 
no  way  to  find  out  about  it,  they  dare  not  marry,  and  so  the 
amount  of  vice  in  the  world  is  increased.  Because  married 
women  do  not  know  about  it,  love  is  turned  to  terror,  and 
marital  happiness  is  wrecked.  Because  the  harmless  and 
proper  methods  are  not  sensibly  taught,  people  use  harmful 
methods,  which  cause  nervous  disorders,  and  wreck  marital 
happiness,  and  break  up  homes.  fThorough  and  sound  knowl- 
edge about  birth  control  is  just  as  essential  to  happiness  in 
marriage  as  knowledge  of  diet  is  necessary  to  health,  or  as 
knowledge  of  economics  is  necessary  to  intelligent  action  as 
a  voter  and  citizen  J  The  suppression  by  law  of  knowledge 
of  birth  control  is  just  as  grave  a  crime  against  human  life 
as  ever  was  committed  by  religious  bigotry  in  the  blackest 
days  of  the  Spanish  Inquisition. 

Now  this  law  stands  on  the  statute  books  of  our  country, 
and  if  I  should  so  much  as  hint  to  you  in  this  book  what  you 
need  to  know,  or  even  where  you  can  find  out  about  it,  I 
should  be  liable  to  five  years  in  jail  and  a  fine  of  $5,CXX),  and 


t 


64:  Love  and  Society 

every  person  who  mailed  a  copy  of  this  book,  or  any  adver- 
tisement of  this  book,  would  be  in  the  same  plight.  But 
there  is  not  yet  a  law  to  prohibit  agitation  against  the  law, 
so  the  first  thing  I  say  to  every  reader  of  this  book  is  that 
they  should  obtain  a  copy  of  the  Birth  Control  Review,  pub- 
lished at  104  Fifth  Avenue,  New  York,  and  also  should  join 
the  Voluntary  Parenthood  League,  206  Broadway,  New  York. 
Get  the  literature  of  these  organizations  and  circulate  them  and 
help  spread  the  light! 

As  to  the  knowledge  which  you  need,  the  only  advice  I 
am  allowed  to  give  is  that  you  should  seek  it.  Seek  it,  and 
persist  in  seeking,  until  you  find  it.  Ask  everyone  you  know ; 
and  ask  particularly  among  enlightened  people,  those  who 
are  wilHng  to  face  the  facts  of  human  life  and  trust  in 
reason  and  common  sense.  I  do  not  know  if  I  am  violating 
the  law  in  thus  telling  you  how  to  find  out  about  birth 
control.  One  of  the  charming  features  of  this  law,  and  others 
against  the  spreading  of  knowledge,  is  that  they  will  never 
tell  you  in  advance  what  you  may  say,  but  leave  you  to  say  it 
and  take  your  chances !  I  believe  that  I  am  not  violating 
any  law  when  I  tell  you  that  there  are  half  a  dozen  simple, 
inexpensive,  and  entirely  harmless  methods  of  preventing 
undesired  parenthood  without  the  destruction  of  the  marital 
relationship. 

I  am  one  of  those  who  for  many  years  believed  that  the 
destruction  of  the  marital  relationship  was  the  only  proper 
and  moral  method.  I  was  brought  up  to  take  the  monkish 
view  of  love.  I  thought  it  was  an  animal  thing  which  required 
some  outside  justification.  I  had  been  taught  nothing  else; 
but  now  I  have  had  personal  experience  of  other  justifications 
of  love,  and  I  believe  that  love  is  a  beautiful  and  joyful  rela- 
tionship, which  not  merely  requires  no  other  justification,  but 
confers  justification  upon  many  other  things  in  life. 

I  used  to  believe  in  that  old  ideal  of  celibacy,  thinking  it 
a  fine  spiritual  exercise.  But  since  then  I  have  looked  out  on 
life,  and  have  found  so  many  interesting  things  to  do,  so 
much  important  work  calling  for  attention,  that  I  do  not 
have  to  invent  any  artificial  exercises  for  my  spirit.  I  have 
looked  at  humanity,  and  brought  myself  to  recognize  the  plain 
common  sense  fact — ^that  whatever  superfluous  energy  I  may 
have  to  waste  upon  artificial  spirituality,  the  great  mass  of  the 
people  have  no  such  energy  to  spare.     They  need  all  their 


The  Book  of  Love  65 

energies  to  get  a  living  for  themselves  and  for  their  wives  and 
little  ones.  They  have  their  sex  impulses,  and  will  follow 
them,  and  the  only  question  is,  shall  they  follow  them  wisely 
or  unwisely?  The  religious  people  decide  that  sexual  indul- 
gence is  wrong,  and  they  impose  a  penalty — and  what  is  that 
penalty?  A  poor,  unwanted  little  waif  of  a  soul,  which  never 
sinned,  and  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  matter,  is  brought 
into  a  hostile  world,  to  suffer  neglect,  and  perhaps  starvation 
— in  order  to  punish  parents  who  did  not  happen  to  be  suffi- 
ciently strong  willed  to  practice  continence  in  marriage! 

I  used  to  believe  that  there  was  benefit  to  health  and  in- 
crease of  power,  whether  physical  or  mental,  in  the  celibate 
life.  I  have  tried  both  ways  of  life,  and  as  a  result  I  know 
that  that  old  idea  is  nonsense.  I  know  now  that  love  is  a 
natural  function.  Of  course,  like  any  other  function  it  can 
be  abused;  just  as  hunger  may  become  gluttony,  sleeping  may 
become  sluggishness,  getting  the  money  to  pay  one's  way 
through  life  may  become  ferocious  avarice.  But  we  do  not 
on  this  account  refuse  ever  to  eat  or  sleep  or  get  money  to 
pay  our  debts.  I  do  not  say  that  I  believe,  I  say  I  know, 
that  free  and  happy  love,  guided  by  wisdom  and  sound  knowl- 
edge, is  not  merely  conducive  to  health,  but  is  in  the  long  run 
necessary  to  health. 

People  who  condemn  birth  control  always  argue  as  if  one 
wished  to  teach  this  knowledge  indiscriminately  to  the  young. 
Perhaps  it  is  natural  that  those  who  oppose  the  use  of  reason 
should  assume  that  others  are  as  irrational  as  themselves.  All 
I  can  say  is  that  I  no  more  believe  in  teaching  birth  control 
to  the  young  than  I  believe  in  feeding  beefsteak  to  nursing 
infants.  There  is  a  period  in  life  for  beefsteaks — or,  if  my 
vegetarian  friends  prefer,  for  lentil  hash  and  peanut  butter 
sandwiches ;  in  exactly  the  same  way  there  is  a  time  for  teach- 
ing the  fundamentals  of  sex,  and  another  time  for  teaching 
the  art  of  happiness  in  marriage,  which  includes  birth  con- 
trol. That  brings  me,  by  a  very  pleasant  transition,  to  the 
other  two  subjects  which  I  have  promised  to  discuss:  early 
marriage  and  education  for  marriage. 


CHAPTER  XL 

EARLY  MARRIAGE 

(Discusses  love  marriages,  how  they  can  be  made,  and  the 
duty  of  parents  in  respect  to  them.) 

I  have  shown  how  economic  forces  in  our  society  make  for 
later  and  later  marriage;  and  at  the  present  time  economic 
forces  are  so  overwhelming  that  all  other  forces  are  hardly 
worth  mentioning  in  comparison.  You  are,  let  us  say,  the 
mother  of  a  boy  of  eighteen,  and  you  have  what  you  call 
"common  sense" — meaning  thereby  a  grasp  of  the  money  facts 
of  life.  If  your  darling  boy  of  eighteen  should  come  to  you 
with  a  grave  face  and  announce,  "Mother  dear,  I  have  met  the 
girl  I  love,  and  we  have  decided  that  we  want  to  get  married" 
-^you  would  consider  that  the  most  absurd  thing  you  had 
ever  heard  in  all  your  born  days,  and  you  would  tell  the  lad 
that  he  was  a  baby,  and  to  run  along  and  play.  If  he  per- 
sisted in  his  crazy  notion,  you  and  your  husband  and  all  the 
brothers  and  sisters  and  relatives  and  friends  both  of  the 
boy  and  the  girl  would  set  to  work,  by  scolding  and  ridiculing, 
to  make  Kfe  a  misery  for  them,  and  ninety-nine  times  out  of 
a  hundred  you  would  break  down  the  young  couple's  mari- 
tal intention. 

But  now,  let  us  try  another  supposition.  Let  us  sup- 
pose that  your  darling  boy  of  eighteen  should  come  to  you 
again  and  say,  "Mother  dear,  some  of  the  boys  are  going 
to  spend  this  evening  in  a  brothel,  and  I  have  decided  to  go 
along."  Would  you  think  that  was  the  most  absurd  thing 
you  had  ever  heard  in  all  your  born  days?  Or  would  you 
answer,  "Yes,  of  course,  my  boy;  that  is  what  I  had  in 
mind  when  I  made  you  give  up  the  girl  you  loved"?  No, 
you  would  not  answer  that.  But  here  is  the  vital  fact — 
it  doesn't  matter  what  you  would  answer,  for  you  would 
never  have  a  chance  to  answer.  When  a  mother's  darling 
wants  to  get  married,  he  comes  and  asks  his  mother's  bless- 
ing; but  never  does  a  mother's  darling  ask  a  blessing  before 
he  goes  with  the  other  boys  to  a  brothel.  He  just  goes. 
Maybe  he  borrows  the  money  from  some  other  fellow,  and 

66 


The  Book  of  Love  67 

next  day  tells  you  he  went  to  a  theater.  Or  maybe  he  picks 
up  some  poor  man's  daughter  on  the  street,  and  takes  her 
into  the  park,  or  up  on  the  roof  of  a  tenement.  Some  such 
thing  he  does,  to  find  satisfaction  for  an  instinct  which  you  in 
your  worldly  wisdom  or  your  heavenly  piety  spurn  and  ridicule. 

I  do  not  wish  to  exaggerate.  If  you  are  an  exception- 
ally wise  and  tactful  mother,  you  may  keep  the  confidence 
of  your  boy,  and  guide  him  day  by  day  through  his  tempta- 
tions and  miseries,  and  keep  him  chaste.  But  the  more  you 
try  that,  the  more  apt  you  will  be  to  come  to  my  conclusion, 
that  late  marriage  is  a  crime  against  the  race;  the  more 
aware  you  will  be  of  the  danger,  either  that  his  boy  friends 
may  break  him  down,  or  that  some  lewd  woman  may  come 
to  his  bedroom  in  the  night-time.  Never  will  you  be  able 
to  be  quite  sure  that  he  is  not  lying  to  you,  because  of  his 
shame,  and  the  pain  he  cannot  bear  to  inflict  upon  you. 
Never  will  you  be  quite  sure  that  he  is  not  hiding  some 
cruel  disease,  sneaking  off  to  some  quack  who  takes  his 
money  and  leaves  him  worse  than  before — until  finally  he 
shoots  off  his  head,  as  happened  to  a  nephew  of  an  old  and 
dear  friend  of  mine. 

Such  is  the  problem  of  the  mother  of  a  son;  and  now, 
what  about  the  mother  of  a  daughter?  This  seems  much 
simpler;  because  your  daughter  is  not  generally  troubled  with 
sex  cravings,  and  if  you  teach  her  the  proprieties,  and  see 
that  she  is  carefully  chaperoned,  you  may  reasonably  hope 
that  she  will  be  chaste.  But  some  day  you  expect  that  she 
will  marry;  and  then  comes  your  problem.  If  you  are  the 
usual  mother,  you  are  looking  for  some  one  who  can  main- 
tain her  in  the  state  of  life  to  which  she  is  accustomed. 
If  a  fairy  prince  would  come  along,  or  a  plaster  saint,  you 
would  be  pleased;  but  failing  that,  you  will  take  a  success- 
ful business  man,  one  who  has  made  his  way  in  the  world 
and  secured  himself  a  position.  But  turn  back  to  the  figures 
I  gave  you  a  while  ago.  If  this  man  is  thirty  years  of  age, 
there  is  at  least  a  fifty-fifty  chance  that  he  has  had  some 
venereal  disease;  and  while  the  doctors  claim  to  cure  these 
diseases  absolutely,  we  must  bear  in  mind  that  doctors  are 
human,  and  sometimes  claim  more  than  they  perform.  Every 
doctor  will  admit,  if  you  pin  him  down,  that  these  diseases 
burrow  deeply  into  the  tissues,  and  many  times  are  supposed 
to  be  cured  when  they  are  only  hidden. 


€8  Love  and  Society 

Here  is,  in  a  nutshell,  the  problem  of  the  mother  of  a 
daughter.  If  you  marry  your  daughter  at  seventeen  to  a 
lad  of  her  own  age,  you  have  a  very  good  chance  of  marry- 
ing her  to  a  person  who  is  chaste.  If  you  marry  her  to  a 
man  of  twenty-five,  you  have  perhaps  one  chance  in  a  hun- 
dred. If  you  marry  her  to  a  man  of  thirty-five,  you  have 
perhaps  one  chance  in  ten  thousand.  You  may  not  like 
these  facts ;  I  do  not  like  them  myself ;  but  I  have  learned 
that  facts  are  none  the  less  facts  on  that  account. 

You  know  the  average  society  bud  of  eighteen,  and  her 
attitude  to  a  boy  of  the  same  age.  She  regards  him  as  a 
child;  and  you  think,  perhaps,  that  it  is  natural  for  a  girl 
to  be  interested  in  men  of  thirty-five  and  even  forty-five. 
But  I  tell  you  that  it  is  not  natural,  it  is  simply  one  of  the 
perversions  of  pecuniary  sex.  The  girl  is  interested  in  such 
men,  because  all  her  young  life  she  has  been  carefully  coached 
'for  the  marriage  market;  because  she  is  dressed  for  it,  and 
solemnly  brought  out,  and  introduced  to  other  players  of 
this  exciting  game  of  marriage  for  money,  with  its  incred- 
ible prizes  of  automobiles  and  jewels  and  palaces  full  of 
servants,  and  magic  check-books  that  never  grow  empty. 
But  suppose  that,  instead  of  regarding  her  as  a  prize  in  a 
lottery,  you  let  her  grow  up  naturally,  and  taught  her  the 
truth  about  herself,  both  body  and  mind;  suppose  that,  in- 
stead of  dressing  her  in  ways  deliberately  contrived  to 
emphasize  her  sex,  you  put  her  in  a  simple  uniform,  and 
taught  her  to  be  honest  and  straightforward,  instead  of  minc- 
ing and  coy;  suppose  she  played  athletic  games  with  boys 
of  her  own  age,  and  invited  them  to  her  home,  not  for  "jazz" 
dancing  and  stuffing  cake  and  candy,  but  for  the  sharing  of 
good  music  and  literature  and  art — don't  you  think  that 
maybe  this  girl  might  become  interested  in  a  lad  of  her  own 
age,  and  choose  him  with  some  understanding  of  his  real  self  ? 

You  take  it  for  granted  that  young  people  should  not 
marry  until  they  can  "afford  it."  But  stop  and  consider,  is 
not  this  a  relic  of  old  days?  Always  it  takes  time,  and  delib- 
erate effort  of  the  reason,  to  adjust  our  conventions  to  new 
facts;  so  face  this  fact — marriage  today  does  not  necessarily 
mean  children,  it  may  just  mean  love.  It  involves  little  more 
expense,  because  the  young  people  need  cost  no  more  together 
than  they  cost  in  the  separate  homes  of  their  parents.  If 
they  are  children  of  the  poor,  they  are  already  taking  care 


The  Book  of  Love  69 

of  themselves.  If  they  are  children  of  the  moderately  well 
off,  their  parents  expect  to  support  them  while  they  are  get- 
ting an  education;  and  why  can  they  not  just  as  well  live 
together,  and  the  parents  of  each  contribute  their  share? 
Let  the  parents  of  the  boy  give  him,  not  merely  what  it  costs 
to  keep  him  at  home,  but  also  the  sums  which  otherwise  the 
boy  would  pay  to  the  brothels.  By  this  argument  I  do  not 
mean  that  I  favor  keeping  young  people  financially  dependent 
upon  their  parents.  My  own  son  is  working  his  own  way 
through  college,  and  I  should  be  glad  to  see  every  young  man 
doing  the  same.  All  that  I  am  saying  is  that  if  parents  are 
going  to  support  their  children  while  they  are  getting  an 
education,  they  might  just  as  well  support  them  married  as 
single,  instead  of  penalizing  matrimony  by  making  all  allow- 
ances cease  at  that  point. 

I  know  a  certain  ardent  feminist,  who  is  all  for  late  mar- 
riage for  women,  and  abhors  my  ideas  on  this  subject.  She 
wants  women  to  get  a  chance  to  develop  their  personalities; 
whereas  I  want  to  sacrifice  them  to  the  frantic  exigencies  of 
the  male  animal!  Young  things  of  seventeen  and  eighteen 
have  no  idea  what  they  are,  or  what  they  want  from  life; 
the  mating  impulse  is  a  blind  frenzy  in  them,  and  they  must 
be  taught  to  control  it,  just  as  they  are  taught  not  to  kill 
when  they  are  angry! 

In  the  first  place,  I  point  out  that  young  ladies  in  col- 
leges and  in  ballrooms  give  a  lot  of  time  and  thought  to 
sex,  even  though  they  do  not  call  it  by  that  inelegant  term. 
I  very  much  question  whether,  if  we  should  apply  our  wis- 
dom to  the  task  of  getting  our  young  people  happily  mated 
before  we  sent  them  off  to  college,  we  should  not  get  a  lot 
more  serious  study  out  of  them  than  we  now  do,  with  all 
their  "fussing"  and  flirting  and  dancing. 

Second,  I  am  willing  to  make  heroic  moral  efforts,  where 
I  see  any  chance  of  adequate  results,  but  I  have  examined 
the  facts,  and  definitely  made  up  my  mind  that  it  is  not 
worth  while,  in  our  present  stage  of  culture,  to  preach  to 
the  mass  of  men  the  doctrine  that  they  should  abstain  from 
sex  experience  until  they  are  twenty-five  or  thirty  years  of 
age.  You  may  storm  at  them,  but  they  only  laugh  at  you; 
you  may  pass  laws,  and  try  to  put  them  in  jail,  but  you  only 
provide  a  harvest  for  blackmailers  and  grafters.  As  to  sacri- 
ficing the  girl,  my  answer  is  simply  that  I  believe  in  love; 
6 


70  Love  and  Society 

and  in  this  I  think  the  girl  will  agree  with  me,  if  you  will 
let  her!  I  have  never  heard  any  qualified  person  maintain 
that  it  hurts  a  girl  to  respond  to  love  at  the  age  of  seventeen 
or  eighteen;  nor  do  I  think  that  it  hurts  a  boy,  provided  that 
he  is  taught  the  virtues  of  moderation  and  self-restraint. 
Without  these,  it  will  hurt  him  to  eat;  but  that  is  no  argu- 
ment for  starving  him.  As  for  the  question  of  his  matur- 
ity and  power  to  judge,  we  are  able  at  present  to  keep  him 
from  marrying  anybody,  so  I  think  we  might  reasonably  hope 
to  keep  him  from  marrying  a  wanton  or  a  slut.  Certainly  we 
might  find  somebody  better  than  the  peroxide  blonde  he  now 
picks  up  in  front  of  the  moving  picture  palace. 

The  question,  at  what  ages  we  shall  advise  our  young 
couple  to  have  children,  is  a  separate  one,  depending  upon 
many  circumstances.  First,  of  course,  they  should  not  have 
any  until  they  are  able  financially  to  maintain  them.  As  to 
the  age  at  which  it  is  physically  advisable,  that  is  a  question 
to  be  settled  by  physicians  and  physiologists.  I  myself  had 
the  idea  that  the  proper  age  would  be  when  the  woman  had 
attained  her  full  stature ;  but  my  friend  Dr.  William  J.  Robin- 
son sends  me  some  statistics  from  the  Johns  Hopkins  Hospital 
Bulletin,  which  startle  me.  This  publication  for  January, 
1922,  gives  the  results  in  five  hundred  childbirths,  in  which 
the  mother's  age  was  from  twelve  to  sixteen  years  inclusive. 
It  appears  that  pregnancy  and  labor  at  these  ages  are  no 
more  dangerous  than  in  older  women ;  but  on  the  other 
hand,  the  duration  of  the  labor  is  actually  shorter,  and  the 
size  of  the  children  is  not  inferior.  These  facts  are  so  con- 
trary to  the  general  impression  that  I  content  myself  with 
calling  attention  to  them,  and  leave  the  commenting  to  be 
done  by  feminists  and  others  who  oppose  themselves  to  the 
idea  of  early  marriage. 


CHAPTER  XLI 

THE  MARRIAGE  CLUB 

(Discusses  how  parents  and  elders  may  help  the  young  to 
avoid  unhappy  marriages.) 

I  will  make  the  assumption  that  you  would  like  to  have 
a  trial  of  my  cure  for  prostitution.  You  would  like  to  do 
something  right  here  and  now,  without  waiting  for  the  social 
revolution.  Very  well:  I  propose  that  you  shall  find  a 
few  other  parents  of  boys  and  girls  who  are  in  revolt  against 
our  system  of  hidden  vice,  and  that  you  will  meet  and  form 
a  modern  marriage  club.  Only  you  won't  call  it  that,  of 
course;  you  will  tactfully  describe  it  as  a  literary  society, 
or  a  social  circle,  or  an  Epworth  League.  The  parents  who 
run  it  will  know  what  it  is  for,  just  as  they  do  today ;  the 
only  difference  being  that  it  will  exist  to  promote  love  matches 
instead  of  money  matches.  It  happens  that  I  am  myself 
a  tactless  sort  of  a  person,  not  skillful  at  avoiding  saying 
what  I  mean.  So,  in  this  chapter,  I  shall  content  myself 
with  setting  forth  exactly  what  this  marriage  club  will  do, 
and  leaving  it  to  more  clever  people  to  supply  the  necessary 
camouflage. 

This  club  will  begin  by  correcting  the  most  stupid  of  all 
our  educational  blunders,  the  assumption  of  the  necessary 
immaturity  of  the  young.  Our  young  people  nowadays 
have  ten  times  as  much  chance  to  learn  and  ten  times  as 
much  stimulus  to  learn  as  we  had;  and  it  is  a  gen- 
erally safe  assumption  that  they  know  much  more  than 
we  think  they  do,  and  are  ready  to  learn  every  sensible  and 
interesting  thing.  I  am  carrying  on  an  epistolary  acquaint- 
ance with  a  little  miss  of  twelve,  who  has  read  half  a  dozen 
of  my  books — among  the  "worst"  of  them — and  writes  me 
letters  of  grave  appreciation.  I  have  talked  on  Socialism  to 
a  thousand  school  children,  and  had  them  question  me  for 
an  hour,  and  heard  just  as  worth  while  questions  as  I  have 
heard  from  an  audience  of  bankers.  Never  in  my  life  have 
I  talked  about  real  things  with  children  that  I  did  not  find 
them  proud  to  be  treated  seriously,  and  eager  to  show  that 

71 


72  Love  and  Society 

they  were  worthy  of  that  honor.    A  great  part  of  our  fooHsh- 
ness  with  children  is  due  to  the  emptiness  of  our  own  heads. 

These  parents  will  delegate  one  man  and  one  woman  to 
make  a  thorough  study  of  the  sex  education  of  the  young. 
Of  course,  there  is  knowledge  about  sex  which  has  to  be 
given  to  the  very  youngest  child,  and  more  and  more  must 
be  given  as  they  grow  older  and  ask  more  questions.  But 
what  I  have  in  mind  here  is  that  detailed  and  precise  knowl- 
edge which  must  be  given  to  the  young  when  they  approach 
the  period  of  puberty.  At  this  age  of  fourteen  or  fifteen  the 
man  will  take  each  of  the  boys  apart,  and  the  woman  will 
take  each  of  the  girls,  and  will  explain  to  them  what  they 
need  to  know.  This  duty  will  not  be  trusted  to  parents,  for 
parents  have  an  imbecile  fear  of  talking  straight  to  their 
children,  and  try  to  get  by  with  rubbish  about  bees  and 
flowers.  Let  every  child  know  that  the  days  of  the  hole-and- 
corner  sex  business  is  forever  past,  and  that  here  is  an 
instructed  person,  who  talks  real  American,  and  knows  what 
he  is  talking  about,  and  will  deal  with  facts,  instead  of  with 
evasions. 

This  club  will  help  to  educate  the  youngsters,  and  also 
to  give  them  a  good  time,  developing  both  their  minds  and 
bodies,  and  learning  to  know  them  thoroughly.  When  they 
are  sixteen  each  one  will  have  another  talk,  this  time  about 
marriage  and  what  it  means ;  learning  that  it  is  not  merely 
flirtations  and  delicious  thrills,  but  a  business  partnership, 
and  the  deepest  and  best  of  all  friendships.  So  when  John 
finds  that  he  likes  Mary  best  of  all  the  girls  he  knows,  this 
won't  be  a  subject  for  "kidding"  and  sly  innuendo,  and 
blushes  and  simpering  on  Mary's  part,  but  an  occasion  for 
decent  and  sensible  talk  about  what  each  of  them  really  is, 
and  what  each  thinks  the  other  to  be.  If  they  think  they 
are  in  love,  then  there  will  be  a  council  of  the  elder  states- 
men, to  consider  that  case,  and  what  are  the  chances  of  hap- 
piness in  that  love.  This  may  sound  forbidding,  but  it  is 
exactly  what  is  done  at  present — only  it  is  not  done  honestly 
and  frankly,  and  therefore  does  not  carry  proper  weight  with 
the  young  people. 

fl  am  an  opponent  of  long  engagements,  ^but  I  am  also 
an  opponent  of  no  engagements  at  all ;  I  know'  no  truer  prov- 
erb than  "Marry  in  haste  and  repent  at  leisure."  It  would 
be  my  idea  that  a  very  young  couple  should  announce  their 


The  Book  of  Love  73 

engagement,  and  then  wait  six  months,  and  be  consulted 
again  about  the  matter,  and  have  a  chance  to  withdraw  with 
no  hard  feelings,  if  either  party  thought  best.  If  they  wished 
to  go  on,  they  might  be  asked  to  wait  another  six  months, 
if  their  elders  felt  very  certain  there  were  reasons  to  doubt 
the  wisdom  of  the  matcK. 

There  are,  of  course,  people  who,  because  of  disease  or 
physical  defect,  should  never  be  allowed  to  marry ;  and  others 
who  might  marry,  but  should  not  be  allowed  to  have  children. 
There  should  be  laws  providing  for  such  cases,  requiring 
physical  examination  before  marriage,  and  in  extreme  cases 
providing  for  a  simple  and  harmless  surgical  operation  to 
prevent  the  hopelessly  unfit  from  passing  on  their  defects  to 
the  future.  But  dealing  for  the  moment  with  normal  young 
persons,  members  of  our  modern  marriage  club,  I  should 
say  that  if,  after  they  have  listened  to  the  warning  of  their 
elders,  and  have  waited  for  a  decent  interval  to  think  things 
over,  they  still  remain  of  the  opinion  that  they  can  make  a 
successful  marriage,  then  it  is  up  to  the  elders  to  wish  them 
luck.  I  have  known  of  young  couples  who  have  refused  to 
heed  warnings,  and  regretted  it;  but  I  have  known  of  others 
who  went  ahead  and  had  their  own  way  and  proved  they  were 
right.  There  is  a  form  of  wisdom  called  experience  and 
there  is  another  form  called  love. 

I  hear  the  worldly  and  cynical  rail  at  the  blindness  of 
"young  love,"  and  I  can  see  the  truth  in  what  they  say; 
but  also  I  can  see  the  deeper  truth  in  the  magic  dreams 
of  the  young  soul.  Here  is  a  youth  who  adores  a  girl,  and 
you  know  the  girl,  and  it  is  comical  to  you,  because  you 
know  she  is  not  any  of  the  things  the  youth  imagines.  But 
who  are  you  that  claim  to  know  the  last  thing  about  a  human 
soul?  Look  into  your  own,  and  see  how  many  different 
things  you  are!  Look  back,  if  you  can,  to  the  time  when 
you  were  young,  and  remember  the  visions  and  the  hopes. 
They  have  lost  all  reality  to  you  now;  but  who  can  say  how 
many  of  them  you  might  have  made  real  if  there  had  been 
one  other  person  who  believed  in  them,  and  loved  them,  and 
would  not  give  them  up? 

I  write  this ;  and  then  I  think  of  the  other  side — ^the  fools 
that  I  have  known  in  love!  The  trusting  women,  marrying 
rotten  men  to  reform  them!  The  pitiful  people  who  think 
that  fine  phrases  and  sentimentality  can  take  the  place  of 


74  Love  and  Society 

facts!  I  implore  my  young  couples  to  sit  down  and  face 
the  realities  of  their  own  natures,  to  decide  what  they  are, 
and  what  they  want  to  be — and  if  there  is  going  to  be  any 
change,  let  it  be  made  and  tried  out  before  marriage!  I 
implore  them  to  begin  now  to  control  their  desires  by  their 
reason  and  judgment;  to  begin,  each  of  them  at  the  very  out- 
set, to  carry  their  share  of  the  burdens  and  do  their  share 
of  the  hard  work.  I  implore  them  to  value  independence 
and  self-reliance  in  the  other,  and  never  above  all  things 
to  marry  from  pity,  which  is  a  worthy  emotion  in  its  place, 
but  has  nothing  to  do  with  sex,  which  should  be  an  affair 
between  equals,  a  matter  of  partnership  and  not  of  parasitism. 
I  think  that,  on  the  whole,  the  most  dreadful  thing  in  love 
is  the  use  of  it  for  preying,  for  the  securing  of  favors  and 
advantages  of  any  sort,  whether  by  men  or  by  women. 


CHAPTER  XLII 

EDUCATION  FOR  MARRIAGE 

(Maintains  that  the  art  of  love  can  be  taught,  and  that  we 
have  the  right  and  the  duty  to  teach  it.) 

I  assume  now  that  our  young  couple  have  definitely  made 
up  their  minds,  and  that  the  wedding  day  is  near.  They 
are  therefore,  both  the  man  and  the  woman,  in  position  to 
receive  information  as  to  the  physical  aspects  of  their  future 
experience.  This  information  is  now  for  the  most  part  pos- 
sessed only  by  pathologists — who  impart  it  too  late,  after 
people  have  blundered  and  wrecked  their  lives.  The  oppo- 
nents of  birth  control  ask  in  horror  if  you  would  teach  it  to 
the  young;  I  am  now  able  to  answer  just  when  I  would 
teach  it;  I  would  teach  it  to  these  young  couples  about  to 
marry.  I  would  make  it  by  law  compulsory  for  every  young 
couple  to  attend  a  school  of  marriage,  and  to  learn,  not  merely 
the  regulation  of  conception,  but  the  whole  art  of  health  and 
happiness  in  sex. 

Perhaps  the  words,  "a  school  of  marriage,"  strike  you 
as  funny.  When  I  was  young  I  remember  that  Pulitzer 
founded  a  school  of  journalism,  and  all  newspaper  editors 
made  merry — ^they  knew  that  journalism  could  only  be  learned 
in  practice.  But  nowadays  every  city  editor  gives  preference 
to  an  applicant  who  has  taken  a  college  course  in  reporting; 
they  have  learned  that  journalism  can  be  taught,  just  like 
engineering  and  accounting.  In  the  same  way  I  assert  that 
marriage  can  be  taught,  and  the  art  of  love,  physical,  men- 
tal, moral,  and  even  financial;  I  think  that  the  day  will  come 
when  enlightened  parents  would  no  more  dream  of  trusting 
their  tender  young  daughter  to  a  man  who  had  not  taken 
a  course  in  sex,  than  they  would  go  up  in  an  aeroplane  with 
a  pilot  who  knew  nothing  about  an  engine. 

The  knowledge  which  I  possess  upon  the  art  of  love  I 
would  be  glad  to  give  you  in  this  book ;  but  unfortunately,  if 
I  were  to  do  so,  my  book  would  be  suppressed,  and  I  should 
be  sent  to  jail. 

Some  ten  or  twelve  years  ago  I  received  a  pitiful  letter 

75 


76  Love  and  Society 

from  a  man  who  was  in  state's  prison  in  Delaware,  charged 
with  having  imparted  information  as  to  birth  control.  Under 
our  amiable  legal  system,  a  perfectly  innocent  man  may  be 
thrown  into  jail,  and  kept  there  for  a  year  or  two  before  he 
is  tried,-  and  if  he  is  without  money  or  friends,  he  might 
as  well  be  buried  alive.  I  went  to  Wilmington  to  call  on  the 
United  States  attorney  who  had  caused  the  indictment  in  this 
case,  and  had  an  illuminating  conversation  with  him.  The 
official  was  anxious  to  justify  what  he  had  done.  He  assured 
me  that  he  was  no  bigot,  but  on  the  contrary  an  extremely 
liberal  man,  a  Unitarian,  a  Progressive,  etc.  "But  Mr.  Sin- 
clair," he  said,  "I  assure  you  this  prisoner  is  not  a  reformer 
or  humanitarian  or  anything  like  that.  He  is  a  depraved 
person.  Look,  here  is  something  we  found  in  his  trunk  when 
we  arrested  him;  a  pamphlet,  explaining  about  sex  relations. 
See  this  paragraph — it  says  that  the  pleasure  of  intercourse 
is  increased  if  it  is  prolonged." 

I  looked  at  the  pamphlet,  and  then  I  looked  at  the  attor- 
ney. "Do  you  think  you  have  stated  the  matter  quite  fairly  ?" 
I  asked.  "Apparently  the  purpose  is  to  explain  that  the  emo- 
tions of  women  are  more  slow  to  be  aroused  than  those  of 
men,  and  that  husbands  failing  to  realize  this,  often  do  not 
gratify  their  wives." 

"Well,"  said  the  other,  "do  you  consider  that  a  subject 
to  be  discussed?" 

"Pardon  me  if  I  discuss  it  just  a  moment,"  I  replied.  "Do 
you  happen  to  know  whether  the  statement  is  a  fact?" 

"No,  I  don't.     It  may  be,  I  suppose." 

"You  have  never  investigated  the  matter?" 

The  legal  representative  of  our  government  was  evidently 
annoyed  by  my  persistence.    "I  have  not,"  he  answered. 

"But  then,  suppose  I  were  to  tell  you  that  thousands  of 
homes  have  been  broken  up  for  lack  of  just  that  bit  of 
knowledge;  that  tens  of  thousands  of  marriages  are  miser- 
able for  lack  of  it." . 

"Surely,  Mr.  Sinclair,  you  exaggerate!" 

"Not  at  all.  I  could  prove  to  you  by  one  medical  author- 
ity after  another,  that  if  the  desire  of  a  woman  in  marriage 
is  roused,  and  then  left  ungratified,  the  result  is  nervous 
strain,  and  in  the  long  run  it  may  be  nervous  breakdown." 

The  above  covers  only  one  detail  of  the  pamphlet  in 
question.    I  read  some  pages  of  it,  and  argued  them  out  with 


The  Book  of  Love  Tl 

the  attorney.  It  was  a  perfectly  simple,  straightforward 
exposition  of  facts  about  the  physiology  of  sex;  and  one  of 
the  reasons  a  man  was  to  be  sent  to  jail  for  several  years 
was — not  that  he  had  circulated  such  a  pamphlet,  not  that 
he  had  showed  it  to  young  people,  but  merely  that  he  had 
it  in  his  trunk! 

There  is  an  honest  and  very  useful  book,  written  by  an 
English  physician,  Dr.  Marie  C.  Stopes,  entitled  "Married 
Love,"  published  by  Dr.  Wm.  J.  Robinson  of  New  York,  a 
specialist  of  authority  and  integrity.  The  book  deals  with  just 
such  vital  facts  in  a  perfectly  dignified  and  straightforward 
manner;  yet  Dr.  Robinson  has  been  hounded  by  the  post- 
office  department  because  of  it;  he  was  convicted  and  forced 
to  pay  a  fine  of  $250,  and  the  book  was  barred  from  the 
mails ! 

I  have  so  much  else  of  importance  to  say  in  this  Book 
of  Love  that  it  would  not  be  sensible  to  jeopardize  it  by  caus- 
ing a  controversy  with  our  official  censors  of  knowledge. 
Therefore  I  will  merely  say  in  general  terms  that  men  and 
women  differ,  not  merely  as  a  sex,  but  as  individuals,  and 
every  marriage  is  a  separate  problem.  (  Every  couple  has  to 
solve  it  in  the  intimacy  of  their  love  life,  and  for  this  there 
are  needed,  first  of  all,  gentleness  on  the  part  of  the  man, 
especially  in  the  first  days  of  the  honeymoon;  and  on  the 
part  of  both  at  all  times  consideration  for  the  other's  welfare 
and  enjoyment,  and  above  all,  frankness  and  honesty  in  talk- 
ing out  the  subject.  Reticence  and  shyness  may  be  virtues 
elsewhere,  but  they  have  no  place  in  the  intimacies  of  the  sex 
life ;  if  men  and  women  will  only  ask  and  answer  frankly,  they 
can  find  out  by  experience  what  makes  the  other  happy,  and 
what  causes  pain.  J  ^ 

We  are  dealing  here  with  the  most  sacred  intimacy  of  life, 
and  one  of  the  most  vital  of  life's  problems  It  is  here,  in 
the  marriage  bed,  that  the  divorce  problem  is  to  be  settled, 
and  likewise  the  problem  of  prostitution ;  for  it  is  when  men 
and  women  fail  to  understand  each  other,  and  to  gratify  each 
other,  that  one  or  the  other  turns  cold  and  indifferent,  per- 
haps ang^  and  hateful — and  then  we  have  passions  unsatis- 
fied, and  ranging  the  world,  breaking  up  other  homes  and 
spreading  disease.  So  I  would  say  to  every  young  couple, 
seek  knowledge  on  this  subject.  Seek  it  without  shame  from 
others  who  have  had  a  chance  to  acquire  it.     Seek  it  also 


78  Love  and  Society 

from  nature,  our  wise  old  mother,  who  knows  so  much  about 
her  children! 

Be  natural;  be  simple  and  straightforward;  and  beware 
of  fool  na'tions  about  sex.  If  you  will  look  in  the  code  of  Ham- 
murabi, which  is  over  four  thousand  years  old,  you  will  see  the 
provision  that  a  man  who  has  intercourse  with  a  menstruat- 
ing woman  shall  be  killed.  In  Leviticus  you  will  read  that 
both  the  man  and  the  woman  are  to  be  cast  put  from  their 
people.  You  will  find  that  most  people  still  have  some  such 
notion,  which  is  without  any  basis  whatever  in  health.  And 
this  is  only  one  illustration  of  many  I  might  give  of  igno- 
rance and  superstition  in  the  sex  life.  I  would  give  this 
as  one  very  good  rule  to  bear  in  mind;  your  love  life  exists 
for  the  happiness  and  health  of  yourself  and  your  partner, 
and  not  for  Hammurabi,  nor  Moses,  nor  Jehovah,  nor  your 
mother-in-law,  nor  anybody  else  on  the  earth  or  above  it. 

Great  numbers  of  people  believe  that  women  are  naturally 
less  passionate  than  men,  and  that  marital  happiness  depends 
upon  men's  recognizing  this.  Of  course,  there  are  defective 
individuals,  both  men  and  women;  but  the  normal  woman 
is  every  bit  as  passionate  as  a  man,  if  once  she  has  been 
taught;  and  if  love  is  given  its  proper  place  in  life,  and 
monkish  notions  not  allowed  to  interfere,  she  will  remain  so 
all  through  life,  in  spite  of  child-bearing  or  anything  else. 
I  say  to  married  couples  that  they  should  devote  themselves 
to  making  and  preserving  passionate  gratification  in  love ; 
because  this  is  the  bright  jewel  in  the  crown  of  marriage,  and 
if  lovers  solve  this  problem,  they  will  find  other  problems  com- 
paratively simple. 


CHAPTER  XLIII 
THE  MONEY  SIDE  OF  MARRIAGE 

(Deals  with  the  practical  side  of  the  life  partnership  of  mat- 
rimony.) 

So  far  we  have  discussed  marriage  as  if  it  consisted  only 
of  love.  But  it  is  manifest  that  this  is  not  the  case.  Mar- 
riage is  every-day  companionship,  and  also  it  is  partnership 
in  a  complicated  business.  In  our  school  of  marriage  there- 
fore we  shall  teach  the  rights  and  duties  of  both  partners  to 
the  contract,  and  shall  face  frankly  the  money  side  of  the 
enterprise. 

One  of  the  first  facts  we  must  get  clear  is  that  the  eco- 
nomics of  marriage  are  in  most  parts  of  the  world  still  based 
upon  the  subjection  of  woman,  and  are  therefore  incom- 
patible with  the  claims  of  woman  as  a  partner  and  comrade. 
They  will  never  be  right  until  the  social  revolution  has  abol- 
ished privilege,  and  the  state  has  granted  to  every  woman  a 
maternity  endowment,  with  a  mother's  pension  for  every  child 
during  the  entire  period  of  the  rearing  and  education  of 
that  child.  Until  this  is  done,  the  average  woman  must 
look  to  some  man  for  the  support  of  her  child,  and  that, 
by  the  automatic  operation  of  economic  force,  makes  her  sub- 
ject to  the  whims  of  the  man.  What  women  have  to  do  is  to 
agitate  for  a  revision  of  the  property  laws  of  marriage;  and 
meantime  to  see  that  in  every  marriage  there  is  an  extra- 
legal understanding,  which  grants  to  the  woman  the  equality 
which  laws  and  conventions  deny  her. 

When  I  was  a  boy  my  mother  had  a  woman  friend  who, 
if  she  wanted  to  go  downtown,  would  borrow  a  quarter  from 
my  mother.  This  woman's  husband  was  earning  a  generous 
salary,  enough  to  enable  him  to  buy  the  best  cigars  by  the 
box,  and  to  keep  a  supply  of  liquors  always  on  hand;  but 
he  gave  his  wife  no  allowance,  and  if  she  wanted  pocket 
money  she  had  to  ask  him  for  it,  each  time  a  separate  favor. 
Yet  this  woman  was  keeping  a  home,  she  was  doing  just  as 
hard  work  and  just  as  necessary  work  as  the  man.  Mani- 
festly, this  was  a  preposterous  arrangement.     If  a  woman 

79 


80  Love  and  Society 

is  going  to  be  a  home-maker  for  a  husband,  it  is  a  simple, 
common-sense  proposition  that  the  salary  of  the  husband  shall 
be  divided  into  three  parts — first,  the  part  which  goes  to  the 
home,  the  benefit  of  which  is  shared  in  common;  second,  the 
part  which  the  husband  has  for  his  own  use;  and  third,  the 
part  which  the  wife  has  for  hers.  The  second  and  third 
parts  should  be  equal,  and  the  wife  should  have  hers,  not 
as  a  favor,  but  as  a  right.  If  the  two  are  making  a  homestead, 
or  running  a  farm,  or  building  up  a  business,  then  half  the 
proceeds  should  be  the  woman's ;  and  it  should  be  legally  in  her 
name,  and  this  as  a  matter  of  course,  as  any  other  business  con- 
tract. If  the  woman  does  not  make  a  home,  but  merely  displays 
fine  clothes  at  tea  parties,  that  is  of  course  another  matter.  Just 
what  she  is  to  do  is  something  that  had  better  be  determined 
before  marriage;  and  if  a  man  wants  a  life-partner,  to  take 
an  interest  in  his  work,  or  to  have  a  useful  work  of  her 
own,  he  had  better  choose  that  kind  of  woman,  and  not  merely 
one  that  has  a  pretty  face  and  a  trim  ankle. 

The  business  side  of  marriage  is  something  that  has  to 
be  talked  out  from  time  to  time;  there  have  to  be  meetings 
of  the  board  of  directors,  and  at  these  meetings  there  ought 
to  be  courtesy  and  kindness,  but  also  plain  facts  and  com- 
mon sense,  and  no  shirking  of  issues.  Love  is  such  a  very 
precious  thing  that  any  man  or  woman  ought  to  be  willing 
to  make  money  sacrifices  to  preserve  it.  But  on  the  other 
hand,  it  is  a  fact  that  there  are  some  people  with  whom 
you  cannot  be  generous;  the  more  you  give  them,  the  more 
they  take,  and  with  such  people  the  only  safe  rule  is  exact 
justice.  Let  married  couples  decide  exactly  what  contribu- 
tion each  makes  to  the  family  life,  and  what  share  of  money 
and  authority  each  is  entitled  to. 

I  might  spend  several  chapters  discussing  the  various  rocks 
on  which  I  have  seen  marriages  go  to  wreck.  For  example, 
extravagance  and  worldly  show ;  clothes  for  women.  In  Paris 
is  a  "demi-monde,"  a  world  of  brutal  lust  combined  with 
riotous  luxury.  The  women  of  this  "half-world"  are  in  touch 
with  the  world  of  art  and  fashion,  and  when  the  rich  cos- 
tumers  and  woman-decorators  want  what  they  call  ideas,  it 
is  to  these  lust-women  they  go.  The  fashions  they  design 
are  always  depraved,  of  course;  always  for  the  flaunting  of 
sex,  never  for  the  suggestion  of  dignity  and  grave  intelligence. 
At  several  seasons  of  the  year  these  lust-women  are  decked 


The  Book  of  Love  81 

out  and  paraded  at  the  race-courses  and  other  gathering  places 
of  the  rich,  and  their  pictures  are  published  in  the  papers 
and  spread  over  all  the  world.  So  forthwith  it  becomes  nec- 
essary for  your  wife  in  Oshkosh  or  Kalamazoo  to  throw 
away  all  the  perfectly  good  clothes  she  owns,  and  get  a  com- 
plete new  outfit — because  "they"  are  wearing  something 
different.  Of  course  the  costume-makers  have  seen  that  it  is 
extremely  different,  so  as  to  make  it  impossible  for  your 
wife  and  children  to  be  happy  in  their  last  season's  clothes. 
I  have  a  winter  overcoat  which  I  bought  fourteen  years  ago, 
and  as  it  is  still  as  good  as  new  I  expect  to  use  it  another 
fourteen  years,  which  will  mean  that  it  has  cost  me  a  dollar 
and  a  half  per  year.  But  think  what  it  would  have  cost  me 
if  I  had  considered  it  necessary  each  year  to  have  an  over- 
coat cut  as  the  keepers  of  French  mistresses  were  cutting 
theirs ! 

But  then,  suppose  you  put  it  up  to  your  wife  and  daughters 
to  wear  sensible  clothes,  and  they  do  so,  and  then  they  observe 
that  on  the  street  your  eyes  turn  to  follow  the  ladies  in  the 
latest  disappearing  skirt?  The  point  is,  you  perceive,  that 
you  yourself  are  partly  to  blame  for  the  fashions.  They 
appeal  to  a  dirty  little  imp  you  have  in  your  own  heart, 
and  when  the  decent  women  discover  that,  it  makes  them 
blazing  hot,  and  that  is  one  of  the  ways  you  may  wreck 
your  domestic  happiness  if  you  want  to.  Unless  I  am  greatly 
mistaken,  when  the  class  war  is  all  over  we  are  going  to 
see  in  our  world  a  sex  war ;  but  it  is  not  going  to  be  between 
the  men  and  the  women,  it  is  going  to  be  between  the  mother 
women  and  the  mistress  women,  and  the  mistress  women 
are  going  to  have  their  hides  stripped  off. 

Men  wreck  marriage  because  they  are  promiscuous;  and 
women  wreck  it  because  they  are  parasites.  Woman  has 
been  for  long  centuries  an  economic  inferior,  and  she  has 
the  vices  of  the  subject  peoples  and  tribes.  Now  there  are 
some  who  want  to  keep  these  vices,  while  at  the  same  time 
claiming  the  new  privileges  which  go  with  equality.  Such 
a  woman  picks  out  a  man  who  is  sensitive  and  chivalrous; 
who  knows  that  women  suffer  handicaps,  pains  of  childbirth, 
physical  weakness,  and  who  therefore  feels  impelled  to  bear 
more  than  his  share  of  the  burdens.  She  makes  him  her 
slave ;  and  by  and  by  she  gets  a  child,  and  then  she  has  him, 
because  he  is  bowed  down  with  awe  and  worship,  he  thinks 


82  Love  and  Society 

that  such  a  miracle  has  never  happened  in  the  world  before, 
and  ^he  spends  the  rest  of  his  life  waiting  on  her  whims  and 
nursing  her  vanities.  I  note  that  at  the  recent  convention 
of  the  Woman's  Party  they  demanded  their  rights  and  agreed 
to  surrender  their  privileges.  There  you  have  the  final  test 
by  which  you  may  know  that  women  really  want  to  be  free, 
and  are  prepared  to  take  the  responsibilities  of  freedom. 


CHAPTER  XLIV 
THE  DEFENSE  OF  MONOGAMY 

(Discusses  the  permanence  of  love,  and  why  we  should  en- 
deavor to  preserve  it.) 

So  far  in  this  discussion  we  have  assumed  that  love  means 
monogamous  love.  We  did  so,  for  the  reason  that  we  could 
not  consider  every  question  at  once.  But  we  have  promised 
to  deal  with  all  the  problems  of  sex  in  the  light  of  reason; 
and  so  we  have  now  to  take  up  the  question,  what  are  the 
sanctions  of  monogamy,  and  why  do  we  refuse  sanction  to 
other  kinds  of  love? 

First,  let  us  set  aside  several  reasons  with  which  we  have 
nothing  to  do.  For  example,  the  reason  of  tradition.  It  is  a  fact 
that  Anglo-Saxon  civilization  has  always  refused  legal  rec- 
ognition to  non-monogamous  marriage.  But  then,  Anglo- 
Saxon  civilization  has  recognized  war,  and  slavery,  and  specu- 
lation, and  private  property  in  land,  and  many  other  things 
which  we  presume  to  describe  as  crimes.  If  tradition  can- 
not justify  itself  to  our  reason,  we  shall  choose  martyrdom. 

Second,  the  religious  reason.  This  is  the  one  that  most 
people  give.  It  is  convenient,  because  it  saves  the  need  of 
thinking.  Suffice  it  here  to  say  that  we  prefer  to  think. 
If  we  cannot  justify  monogamy  by  the  facts  of  life,  we  shall 
declare  ourselves  for  polygamy. 

What  are  the  scientific  and  rational  reasons  for  monog- 
amy ?  First  among  them  is  venereal  disease.  This  may  seem 
like  a  vulgar  reason,  but  no  one  can  deny  that  it  is  real. 
There  was  a  time,  apparently,  when  mankind  did  not  suffer 
from  these  plagues,  and  we  hope  there  may  be  such  a  time 
again.  I  shall  not  attempt  to  prescribe  the  marital  customs 
for  the  people  of  that  happy  age;  I  suspect  that  they  will 
be  able  to  take  care  of  themselves.  Confining  myself  to  my 
lifetime  and  yours,  I  say  that  the  aim  of  every  sensible  man 
and  woman  must  be  to  confine  sex  relations  to  the  smallest 
possible  limits.  I  know,  of  course,  that  there  are  prophy- 
lactics, and  the  army  and  navy  present  statistics  to  show  that 
they  succeed  in  a  great  proportion  of  cases.    But  if  you  are 

83 


84  Love  and  Society 

one  of  those  persons  in  whose  case  they  don't  succeed,  you 
will  find  the  statistics  a  cold  source  of  comfort  to  you. 

John  and  Mary  go  to  the  altar,  or  to  the  justice  of  the 
peace,  and  John  says :  "With  all  my  worldly  goods  I  thee 
endow."  But  the  formula  is  incomplete;  it  ought  to  read: 
"And  Hkewise  with  the  fruits  of  my  wild  oats."  Marriage  is 
a  contract  wherein  each  of  the  contracting  parties  agrees  to 
share  whatever  pathogenic  bacteria  the  other  party  may  have 
or  acquire;  surely,  therefore,  the  contract  involves  a  right 
of  each  party  to  have  a  say  as  to  how  many  chances  of 
infection  the  other  shall  incur.  John  goes  off  on  a  busi- 
ness trip,  and  is  lonesome,  and  meets  an  agreeable  widow, 
and  figures  to  himself  that  there  is  very  little  chance  that  so 
charming  a  person  can  be  dangerous.  But  maybe  Mary 
wouldn't  agree  with  his  calculations ;  maybe  Mary  would 
not  consider  it  a  part  of  the  marriage  bargain  that  she  should 
take  the  diseases  of  the  agreeable  widow.  What  commonly 
happens  is  that  Mary  is  not  consulted;  John  revises  the  con- 
tract in  secret,  making  it  read  that  Mary  shall  take  a  chance 
at  the  diseases  of  the  widow.  How  can  any  thinking  person 
deny  that  John  has  thus  committed  an  act  of  treason  to  Mary? 

I  know  that  there  are  people  who  don't  mind  running  such 
chances;  that  is  one  reason  why  there  are  venereal  diseases. 
All  I  can  say  is  that  the  sex-code  set  forth  in  this  book  is 
based  upon  the  idea  that  to  deliver  mankind  from  the  venereal 
plague,  we  wish  to  confine  the  sex  relationship  within  the 
narrowest  limits  consistent  with  health,  happiness  and  spirit- 
ual development ;  and  that  to  this  end  we  take  the  young  and 
teach  them  chastity,  and  we  marry  them  early  while  they  are 
clean,  and  then  we  call  upon  them  to  make  the  utmost  effort 
to  make  a  success  of  that  union,  and  to  make  it  a  matter 
of  honor  to  keep  the  marital  faith.  We  do  this  with  some 
hope  of  effectiveness,  because  we  have  made  our  program 
consistent  with  the  requirements  of  nature,  the  genuine  needs 
of  love  both  physical  and  spiritual. 

The  second  argument  for  monogamy  is  the  economic  one. 
We  have  dreamed  a  social  order  where  every  child  will  be 
guaranteed  maintenance  by  the  state,  and  where  women  will  be 
free  from  dependence  on  men.  What  will  be  the  love  arrange- 
ments of  men  and  women  under  this  new  order  is  another 
problem  which  we  leave  for  them  to  decide,  in  the  certainty 
that  they  will  know  more  about  it  than  we  do.     Meantime, 


The  Book  of  Love  85 

we  are  for  the  present  under  the  private  property  regime, 
and  have  to  love  and  marry  and  raise  our  children  accord- 
ingly. The  children  must  have  homes,  and  if  they  are 
to  be  normal  children,  they  must  have  both  the  male 
and  female  influence  in  their  lives;  which  means  that 
their  parents  must  be  friends  and  partners,  not  quarrel- 
ing in  secret.  This  argument,  I  know,  is  one  of  expediency. 
I  have  adopted  it,  after  watching  a  great  number  of  people 
try  other  than  monogamous  sex  arrangements,  and  seeing 
their  chances  of  happiness  and  success  wrecked  by  the  pres- 
sure of  economic  forces.  To  rebel  against  social  compulsion 
may  be  heroism,  and  again  it  may  be  merely  bad  judgment. 
For  my  part,  the  world's  greatest  evil  is  poverty,  the  cause 
of  crime,  prostitution  and  war.  I  concentrate  my  energies 
upon  the  abolishing  of  that  evil,  and  I  let  other  problems 
wait. 

The  third  reason  is  that  monogamy  is  economical  pf  hu- 
man time  and  thought.  The  business  of  finding  and  wooing 
a  mate  takes  a  lot  of  energy,  and  adjustment  after  marriage 
takes  more.  To  throw  away  the  results  of  this  labor  and 
do  it  all  over  again  is  certainly  not  common  sense.  Of  course, 
if  you  bake  a  cake  and  burn  it,  you  have  to  get  more  ma- 
terial and  make  another  try;  but  that  is  a  different  matter 
from  baking  a  cake  with  the  deliberate  intention  of  throw- 
ing it  away  after  a  bite  or  two. 

The  advocates  of  varietism  in  love  will  here  declare 
that  we  are  begging  the  question.  We  are  assuming  that 
love  and  the  love  chase  are  not  worthy  in  themselves, 
but  merely  means  to  some  other  end.  Can  it  be  that 
love  delights  are  the  keenest  and  most  intense  that  hu- 
mans can  experience,  and  that  all  other  purposes  of  life  are 
contributory  to  them?  Certainly  a  great  deal  of  art  lends 
support  to  this  idea,  and  many  poets  have  backed  up  their 
words  by  their  deeds.    As  Coleridge  phrased  it: 

"All  thoughts,  all  passions,  all  delights. 
Whatever  stirs  this  mortal  frame. 
All  are  but  ministers  of  Love 
And  feed  his  sacred  flame." 

This  is  a  question  not  to  be  played  with.     Experimenting 
in  love  is  costly,  and  millions  have  wrecked  their  lives  by 
7 


86  Love  and  Society 

it.  The  sex  urge  in  us  is  imperious  and  cruel ;  it  wants 
nothing  less  than  the  whole  of  us,  body,  mind  and  spirit, 
and  ofttimes  it  behaves  like  the  genii  in  the  bottle — it  gets 
out,  and  not  all  the  powers  in  the  universe  can  get  it  back. 
I  have  talked  with  many  men  about  sex  and  heard  them  say 
that  it  presents  itself  to  them  as  an  unmitigated  torment, 
something  they  would  give  everything  they  own  to  be  free 
of.  And  these,  mind  you,  not  men  living  in  monasteries, 
trying  to  repress  their  natural  impulses,  but  men  of  the 
world,  who  have  lived  freely,  seeking  pleasure  and  taking  it 
as  it  came.  The  primrose  path  of  dalliance  did  not  lead 
them  to  peace,  and  the  pursuit  of  variety  in  love  brought  them 
only  monotony. 

I  stop  and  think  of  one  after  another  of  these  sex-ridden 
people,  and  I  cannot  think  of  one  whom  I  would  envy.  I 
know  one  who  in  a  frenzy  of  unhappiness  seized  a  razor 
and  castrated  himself.  I  think  of  another,  a  certain  class- 
mate in  college  whom  I  once  stopped  in  a  conversation,  re- 
marking: "Did  you  ever  realize  what  a  state  you  have  got 
your  mind  into  ?  Everything  means  sex  to  you.  Every  phrase 
you  hear,  every  idea  that  is  suggested— you  try  to  make 
some  sort  of  pun,  to  connect  it  somehow  or  other  with  sex." 
The  man  thought  and  said,  "I  guess  that's  true."  The  idea 
had  never  occurred  to  him  before ;  he  had  just  gone  on  letting 
his  instincts  have  their  way  with  him,  without  ever  putting 
his  reason  upon  the  matter. 

That  was  a  crude  kind  of  sex;  but  I  think  of  another 
man,  an  idealist  and  champion  of  human  liberty.  One  of  the 
forms  of  liberty  he  maintained  was  the  right  to  love  as  many 
women  as  he  pleased,  and  although  he  was  a  married  man, 
one  hardly  ever  saw  him  that  he  was  not  courting  some 
young  girl.  As  a  result,  his  mental  powers  declined,  and 
he  did  little  but  talk  about  ideas.  I  do  not  know  anyone  today 
who  respects  him — except  a  few  people  who  live  the  same 
sort  of  life.  The  thought  of  him  brings  to  my  mind  a 
sentence  of  Nietzsche — a  man  who  surely  stood  for  freedom 
of  personality:  "I  pity  the  lovers  who  have  nothing  higher 
than  their  love." 

A  question  like  this  can  be  decided  only  by  the  experience 
of  the  race.  Some  will  make  love  the  end  and  aim  of  life, 
and  others  will  make  it  the  means  to  other  ends,  and  we 
shall  see  which  kind  of  people  achieve  the  best  results,  which 


The  Bcx)k  of  Love  87 

kind  are  the  most  useful,  the  most  dignified,  the  most  original 
and  vital.  I  have  seen  a  great  many  young  people  try  the 
experiment  of  "free  love,"  and  I  have  seen  some  get  enough 
of  it  and  quit;  I  could  name  among  these  half  a  dozen  of 
our  younger  novelists.  I  know  others  who  are  still  in  it 
— and  I  watch  their  lives  and  find  them  to  be  restless,  jealous, 
egotistical  and  idle.  My  defense  of  monogamy  is  based  upon 
the  fact  that  I  have  never  known  any  happy  or  successful 
"free  lovers."  Of  course,  I  know  some  noble  and  sincere 
people  who  do  not  believe  in  the  marriage  contract,  and 
refuse  to  be  bound  by  law;  but  these  people  are  as  monog- 
amous as  I  am,  even  more  tightly  bound  by  honor  than  if 
they  were  duly  married. 

It  seems  to  be  in  the  very  nature  of  true  and  sincere 
love  to  imagine  permanence,  to  desire  it  and  to  pledge  it. 
If  you  aren't  that  much  in  love,  you  aren't  really  in  love  at 
all,  and  you  had  better  content  yourself  with  strolling  to- 
gether and  chatting  together  and  dining  together  and  play- 
ing music  together.  So  many  pleasant  ways  there  are  in 
which  men  and  women  can  enjoy  each  other's  company  with- 
out entering  upon  the  sacred  intimacy  of  sex !  You  can  learn 
to  take  sex  lightly,  of  course,  but  if  you  do  so,  you  reduce 
by  so  much  the  chances  that  true  and  deep  love  will  ever 
come  to  you;  for  true  and  deep  love  requires  some  patience, 
some  reverence,  some  tending  at  a  shrine.  The  animals  mate 
quickly  and  get  it  over  with;  but  the  great  discoveries 
about  love,  and  the  possibilities  of  the  human  soul 
in  love,  have  come  because  men  and  women  have  been 
willing  to  make  sacrifices  for  it,  to  take  it  seriously  — 
and  more  especially  to  take  seriously  the  beloved  person, 
the  rights  and  needs  and  virtues  of  that  person.  From  the 
lives  of  such  we  learn  that  love  is  nature's  device  for  taking 
us  out  of  ourselves,  and  making  us  truly  social  creatures. 

Early  in  my  life  as  a  writer  I  undertook  to  answer  Ger- 
trude Atherton,  in  her  glorification  of  the  sex-corruptions  of 
capitalist  society.  She  indicted  American  literature  for  its 
"bourgeois"  qualities — among  these  the  fact  that  American 
authors  had  a  prejudice  in  favor  of  living  with  their  own 
wives.  Mrs.  Atherton  set  forth  the  joys  of  sex  promiscuity 
as  they  are  understood  by  European  artists,  and  I  ventured 
in  replying  to  remark  that  "one  woman  can  be  more  to  a  man 
than  a  dozen  can  possibly  be."    That  sounds  like  a  paradox. 


88  Love  and  Society 

but  it  is  really  a  profound  truth,  and  the  person  who  does 
not  understand  it  has  missed  the  best  there  is  in  the  sex 
relation.  There  is  a  limit  to  the  things  of  the  body,  but  to 
those  of  the  mind  and  spirit  there  is  no  limit,  and  so  there 
is  no  reason  why  true  love  should  ever  fall  prey  to  boredom 
and  satiety. 


CHAPTER  XLV 

THE  PROBLEM  OF  JEALOUSY 

(Discusses  the  question,  to  what  extent  one  person  may  hold 
another  to  the  pledge  of  love.) 

Once  upon  a  time  I  knew  an  Anarchist  shoemaker,  the 
same  who  had  me  sent  to  jail  for  playing  tennis  on  Sunday, 
as  I  have  narrated  in  "The  Brass  Check."  I  remember  argu- 
ing with  him  concerning  his  ideas  of  sex,  which  were  of  the 
freest.  I  can  hear  the  very  tones  of  his  voice  as  he  put 
the  great  unanswerable  question:  "What  are  you  going  to 
do  about  the  problem  of  jealousy?"  And  I  had  no  response 
at  hand;  for  jealousy  is  truly  a  most  cruel  and  devastating 
and  imlovely  emotion;  and  yet,  how  can  you  escape  it,  if 
you  are  going  to  preserve  monogamy? 

The  Anarchist  shoemaker's  solution  was  to  break  down 
all  the  prejudices  against  sexual  promiscuity.  Free  and  un- 
limited license  was  every  person's  right,  and  for  any  other 
person  to  interfere  was  enslavement,  for  any  other  person  to 
criticize  was  superstition.  But  the  power  of  superstition 
is  strong  in  the  world,  and  the  shoemaker  found  men  resent- 
ful of  his  teachings,  and  disposed  to  confiscate  the  rights  of 
their  wives  and  daughters.  Hence  the  shoemaker's  disap- 
proval of  jealousy. 

Other  men,  less  purely  physiological  in  their  attitude  to 
sex,  have  wrestled  with  this  same  problem  of  jealousy.  H. 
G.  Wells  has  a  novel,  "In  the  Days  of  the  Comet,"  in  which 
he  portrays  two  men,  both  nobly  and  truly  in  love  with  the 
same  woman.  One  in  a  passion  of  jealousy  is  about  to  mur- 
der the  other,  when  a  great  social  transformation  is  magically 
brought  about,  and  the  would-be  murderer  wakes  up  to  imi- 
versal  love,  and  the  two  men  nobly  and  lovingly  share  the 
same  woman.  Shelley  also  dreamed  this  dream,  inviting  two 
women  to  share  him.  I  have  known  others  who  tried  it,  but 
never  permanently.  I  do  not  say  that  it  never  has  succeeded, 
or  that  it  never  can  succeed.  In  this  book  I  am  renouncing 
the  future — I  am  trying  to  give  practical  advice  to  people,  for 
the  conduct  of  their  lives  here  and  now,  and  my  advice  on 

89 


90  Love  and  Society 

this  point  is  that  polygamous  and  polyandrous  experiments 
in  modern  capitaHst  society  cost  more  than  they  are  worth. 

I  once  knew  a  certain  high  school  teacher,  who  believed 
religiously  in  every  kind  of  freedom.  When  she  married, 
she  and  her  husband,  an  artist,  made  a  vow  against  jealousy ; 
but  as  it  worked  out,  this  vow  meant  that  the  wife  had  a 
steady  job  and  took  care  of  the  husband,  while  he  loafed  and 
loved  other  women.  When  finally  she,  grew  tired  of  it,  he 
accused  her  of  being  jealous;  also,  she  had  brought  it  down 
to  the  matter  of  money!  I  know  another  woman,  an  Anar- 
chist, widely  known  as  a  lecturer  on  sex  freedom.  She  laid 
down  the  general  principle  of  unlimited  personal  freedom  for 
all,  and  she  tried  to  live  up  to  her  faith.  She  entered  into 
a  "free  union"  with  a  certain  man,  and  when  she  discovered 
that  he  was  making  love  to  another  woman,  in  the  presence 
of  a  friend  of  mine  she  threw  a  vase  of  flowers  at  his  head. 
You  see,  her  general  principles  had  clashed  with  another  gen- 
eral principle,  to  the  effect  that  a  person  who  feels  deep  and 
strong  love  inevitably  desires  that  love  to  endure,  and  cannot 
but  suffer  to  see  it  preyed  upon  and  destroyed,  j 

Let  us  first  consider  the  question,  just  what  are  the  true 
and  proper  implications  of  monogamous  love?  The  Roman 
Catholic  church  advocates  "monogamy,"  and  understands 
thereby  that  a  man  and  woman  pledge  themselves  "till  death 
do  us  part,"  and  if  either  of  them  cancels  this  arrangement 
it  is  adultery  and  mortal  sin.  I  hope  that  none  of  my  readers 
understands  by  "monogamy"  any  such  system  of  spiritual 
strangulation.  My  own  idea  is  rather  what  some  church- 
man has  sarcastically  described  by  the  term  "progressive 
polygamy."  I  believe  that  a  man  and  woman  should  pledge 
their  faith  in  love,  and  should  keep  that  faith,  and  endeavor 
with  all  their  best  energies  to  make  a  success  of  it;  they 
should  strive  each  to  understand  the  other's  needs,  and  unsel- 
fishly to  fulfill  them,  within  the  limits  of  fair  play.  But  if, 
after  such  an  effort  has  been  truly  made,  it  becomes  clear 
that  the  union  does  not  mean  health  and  happiness  for  one 
of  the  parties,  that  party  has  a  right  to  withdraw  from  it, 
and  for  any  government  or  church  or  other  power  to  deny 
that  right  is  both  folly  and  cruelty. 

Now,  on  the  basis  of  this  definition  of  monogamy — or, 
if  you  prefer,  of  progressive  polygamy — we  are  in  position 
to  say  what  we  think  about  jealousy.     If  two  people  pledge 


The  Book  of  Love  91 

their  faith,  and  one  breaks  it,  and  the  other  complains,  we 
do  not  call  that  jealousy,  but  just  common  decency.  Neither 
do  we  call  it  jealousy  if  one  expects  the  other  to  avoid  the 
appearance  of  guilt;  for  love  is  a  serious  thing,  not  to  be 
played  with,  and  I  think  that  a  person  who  truly  loves  will 
do  everything  possible  to  make  clear  to  the  beloved  that  he 
is  keeping  and  means  to  keep  the  plighted  faith. 

You  may  say  that  I  am  using  words  arbitrarily,  in  en- 
deavoring thus  to  distinguish  between  justifiable  and  unjusti- 
fiable jealousy,  and  calling  the  former  by  some  other  nanre. 
It  does  not  make  much  difference  about  words,  provided  I 
make  clear  my  meaning.  I  could  point  out  a  whole  string  of 
words  which  have  good  meanings  and  bad  meanings,  and  can- 
not be  discussed  without  preliminary  explanations  and  dis- 
tinctions ;  religion,  for  example,  and  morality,  and  aristocracy, 
and  justice,  to  name  only  a  few.  Most  people's  thinking 
about  marriage  and  love  has  been  made  like  soup  in  a  cheap 
restaurant,  by  dumping  in  all  kinds  of  scraps  and  notions 
from  such  opposite  poles  of  human  thought  as  Christian 
monkery  and  Renaissance  license,  absurdly  called  "romance." 
So  before  you  can  do  any  thinking  about  a  problem  like 
jealousy,  you  have  to  agree  to  use  the  word  to  mean  some- 
thing definite,  whether  good  or  bad. 

We  shall  take  jealousy  as  a  "bad"  word,  and  use  it  to 
mean  the  setting  up,  by  a  man  or  woman,  of  some  claim  to 
the  love  of  another  person,  which  claim  cannot  be  justified 
in  the  court  of  reason  and  fair  play.  This  includes,  in 
the  first  place,  all  claims  based  upon  a  courtship,  not 
ratified  by  marriage.  It  is  to  the  interest  of  society  and 
the  race  that  men  and  women  should  be  free  to  investi- 
gate persons  of  the  other  sex,  and  to  experiment  with  the 
aflFections  before  pledges  of  marriage  are  made.  If  sen- 
sible customs  of  iove  and  just  laws  of  marriage  were  made, 
there  would  be  no  excuse  for  a  woman's  giving  herself  to  a 
man  before  marriage;  she  should  be  taught  not  to  do  it,  and 
then  if  she  does  it,  the  risk  is  her  own,  and  the  disgusting 
perversion  of  venality  and  greed  known  as  the  "breach  of 
promise  suit"  should  be  unknown  in  our  law.  The  young 
should  be  taught  that  it  is  the  other  person's  right  to  change 
his  mind  and  withdraw  at  any  time  before  marriage;  what- 
ever pains  and  pangs  this  may  cause  must  be  borne  in  silence. 

The  second  kind  of  jealousy  is  that  which  seeks  to  keep 


92  Love  and  Society 

in  the  marriage  bond  a  person  who  is  not  happy  in  it  and 
has  asked  to  be  released.  The  law  sanctions  this  kind  of 
cowardly  selfishness,  which  manifests  itself  every  day  on  the 
front  pages  of  our  newspapers — a  spe:ctacle  of  monstrous  and 
loathsome  passions  unleashed  and  even  glorified.  Husbands 
set  the  bloodhounds  of  the  law  after  wives  who  have  fled 
with  some  other  man,  and  send  the  man  to  a  cell,  and  drag 
the  woman  back  to  a  loveless  home.  Wives  engage  private 
detectives,  and  trail  their  husbands  to  some  "love  nest,"  and 
then  ensue  long  public  wrangles,  with  washing  of  filthy  linen, 
and  the  matter  is  settled  by  a  "separation."  The  virtuous  wife, 
who  may  have  driven  the  man  away  by  neglect  or  vanity  or 
stupidity,  is  granted  a  share  of  his  earnings  for  the  balance 
of  her  life;  and  two  more  people  are  added  to  the  millions 
who  are  denied  sexual  happiness  under  the  law,  and  are  there- 
by impelled  to  live  as  law  violators. 

For  this  there  is  only  one  remedy  conceivable.  We  have 
banned  cannibalism  and  slavery  and  piracy  and  duelling,  and 
we  must  ban  one  more  ancient  and  cruel  form  of  human 
oppression,  the  effort  to  hold  people  in  the  bonds  of  sex  by 
any  other  power  save  that  of  love.  I  am  aware  that  the 
reactionaries  who  read  this  book  will  take  this  sentence  out 
of  its  context  and  quote  it  to  prove  that  I  am  a  "free  lover." 
I  shall  be  sorry  to  have  that  done,  but  even  so,  I  was  not 
willing  to  live  in  slavery  myself,  and  I  am  not  willing  to 
advocate  it  for  others.  I  am  aware  that  there  are  degenerate 
and  defective  individuals,  and  that  we  have  to  miake  special 
provision  for  them,  as  I  shall  presently  set  forth;  but  the 
average,  normal  human  being  must  be  free  to  decide  what 
is  love  for  him,  and  what  is  happiness  for  him.  Every  per- 
son in  the  world  will  have  to  deny  himself  the  right  to  demand 
love  where  love  is  not  freely  given,  and  all  lovers  in  the  world 
will  have  to  hold  themselves  ready  to  let  the  loved  one  go 
if  and  when  the  loved  one  dem,ands  it.  I  am  aware  that  this 
is  a  hard  saying,  and  a  hard  duty,  but  it  is  one  that  life  lays 
upon  us,  and  one  that  there  is  no  escaping. 


CHAPTER  XLVI 
THE  PROBLEM  OF  DIVORCE 

(Defends  divorce  as  a  protection  to  monogamous  love,  and 
one  of  the  means  of  preventing  infidelity  and  prostitution.) 

You  will  hear  sermons  and  read  newspaper  editorials  about 
the  "divorce  evil,"  and  you  will  find  that  to  the  preacher  or 
editor  this  "evil"  consists  of  the  fact  that  more  and  more  people 
are  refusing  to  stay  unhappily  married.  It  does  not  interest 
these  moralizers  if  the  statistics  show  that  it  is  women  who  are 
getting  most  of  the  divorces,  and  that  the  meaning  of  the  phe- 
nomenon is  that  women  are  refusing  to  continue  living  with 
drunken  and  dissolute  men.  To  the  clergy,  the  breaking  of  a 
marriage  is  an  evil  per  se,  and  regardless  of  circumstances. 
They  know  this  because  God  has  told  them  so,  and  in  the  name 
of  God  they  seek  to  keep  people  tied  in  sex  unions  which  have 
come  to  mean  loathing  instead  of  love. 

Now,  I  will  assert  it  as  a  mathematical  certainty  that  a  con- 
siderable percentage  of  marriages  must  fail.  It  is  essential  to 
progress  that  human  beings  should  grow,  both  mentally  and 
spiritually,  and  manifestly  they  cannot  all  grow  in  the  same  way. 
If  they  grow  diflFerently,  must  they  not  sometimes  lose  the  power 
to  make  each  other  happy  in  the  marital  bonds  ?  Who  does  not 
know  the  man  who  masters  life  and  becomes  a  vital  force, 
while  his  wife  remains  dull  and  empty  ?  If  such  a  man  changes 
wives,  the  world  in  general  denounces  him  as  a  selfish  beast; 
but  the  world  does  not  know  nor  does  it  care  about  those  thou- 
sands of  men  who,  not  caring  to  be  branded  as  selfish  beasts, 
fulfill  the  needs  of  their  lives  by  keeping  mistresses  in  secret. 

I  knew  a  certain  country  school  teacher,  one  of  the  most 
narrowly  conventional  young  women  imaginable,  who  was 
engaged  to  a  middle-aged  business  man.  He  went  to  New  York 
on  a  business  trip,  and  stayed  a  couple  of  months,  and  wrote  her 
that  he  had  met  some  Anarchists,  and  had  discovered  that  all 
he  had  read  about  them  in  the  newspapers  was  false,  and 
that  they  were  the  true  and  pure  idealists  to  whom  the  rest  of 
liis  life  must  be  devoted.  The  young  lady  was  horrified ;  nor 
was  she  any  happier  when  she  came  to  New  York  and  met  her 

93 


94:  Love  and  Society 

fiance's  new  friends.  She  ought  in  common  sense  to  have 
broken  the  engagement ;  but  she  was  in  love,  and  she  married,  as 
many  another  fool  woman  does,  with  the  idea  of  "reforming" 
the  man.  She  failed,  and  was  utterly  and  unspeakably 
wretched. 

I  know  another  man,  a  conservative  capitalist  of  narrow 
and  aggressive  temper,  whose  wife  turned  into  an  ardent  Bol- 
shevik. The  man  thinks  that  all  Bolsheviks  should  be  shut  up 
in  jail  for  life,  while  the  wife  is  equally  certain  that  all  jails 
should  be  razed  to  the  ground  and  all  Bolsheviks  placed  in  con- 
trol of  the  government.  These  two  people  have  got  to  a  point 
where  they  cannot  sit  down  to  the  breakfast  table  without  flying 
into  a  quarrel.  I  know  another  case  of  a  modern  scientist,  an 
agnostic,  whose  wife,  a  half-educated,  sentimental  woman,  took 
to  dabbling  in  mysticism,  and  drove  him  wild  by  setting  up  an 
image  of  Buddha  in  her  bedroom,  and  consorting  with  "swamis" 
in  long  yellow  robes.  I  know  another  whose  wife  turned 
into  an  ultra-pious  Catholic,  and  turned  over  the  care  of  his 
domestic  life  to  a  priest.  Is  it  not  obvious  that  the  only  possible 
solution  of  such  problems  lies  in  divorce?  Unless,  indeed,  we 
are  all  of  us  going  to  turn  over  the  care  of  our  domestic  lives  to 
the  priests ! 

Our  grandfathers  and  grandmothers  believed  one  thing,  and 
believed  the  same  thing  when  they  were  seventy  as  when  they 
were  twenty ;  so  it  was  possible  for  them  to  dwell  in  domestic 
security  and  permanence  till  death  did  them  part.  But  we  are 
learning  to  change  our  minds ;  and  whether  what  we  believe  is 
better  or  worse  than  what  our  ancestors  believed,  at  least  it  is 
different.  Also  we  are  coming  to  take  what  we  believe  with 
^more  seriousness ;  the  intellectual  life  means  more  and  more  to 
us,  and  it  becomes  harder  and  harder  for  us  to  find  sexual  and 
domestic  happiness  with  a  partner  who  does  not  share  our  con- 
victions, but,  on  the  contrary,  may  be  contributing  to  the 
campaign  funds  of  the  opposition  party. 

I  do  not  mean  by  this  that  people  should  get  a  divorce  as 
soon  as  they  find  they  differ  about  some  intellectual  idea ;  on  the 
contrary,  I  have  advocated  that  they  should  do  everything  pos- 
sible to  understand  and  to  tolerate  each  other.  But  it  is  a  fact 
that  intellectual  convictions  are  the  raw  material  out  of  which 
characters  and  lives  are  made,  and  it  is  inevitable  that  some 
characters  and  lives  that  fit  quite  well  at  twenty  should  fit  very 
badly  at  thirty  or  forty.    When  we  refuse  divorce  under  such 


The  Book  or  Love  95 

circumstances  we  are  not  fostering  marriage,  as  we  fondly 
imagine ;  we  are  really  fostering  adultery.  It  is  a  fact  that  not 
one  person  in  ten  who  is  held  by  legal  or  social  force  in  an 
unhappy  sex  union  will  refrain  from  seeking  satisfaction  out- 
side; and  because  these  outside  satisfactions  are  disgraceful, 
and  in  some  cases  criminal,  they  seldom  have  any  permanence. 
Therefore  it  follows  that  "strict"  divorce  laws,  such  as  the 
clerical  propaganda  urges  upon  us,  are  in  reality  laws  for  the 
promotion  of  fornication  and  prostitution. 

There  is  a  short  story  by  Edith  Wharton,  in  which  the 
"divorce  evil"  is  exhibited  to  us  in  its  naked  horror ;  the  story 
called  "The  Other  Two,"  in  the  volimie  "The  Descent  of  Man." 
A  society  woman  has  been  divorced  twice  and  married  three 
times,  and  by  an  ingenious  set  of  circumstances  the  woman  and 
all  three  of  the  men  are  brought  into  the  same  drawing-room  at 
the  same  time.  Just  imagine,  if  you  can,  such  an  excruciating 
situation :  a  woman,  her  husband,  and  two  men  who  used  to  be 
her  husbands,  all  compelled  to  meet  together  and  think  of  some- 
thing to  say !  I  cite  this  story  because  it  is  a  perfect  illustration 
of  the  extent  to  which  the  "divorce  problem"  is  a  problem  of 
our  lack  of  sense.  Mrs.  Wharton  will,  I  fear,  consider  me  a 
very  vulgar  person  if  I  assert  that  there  is  absolutely  no  reason 
whatever  why  any  of  those  four  people  in  her  story  should  have 
had  a  moment's  discomfort  of  mind,  except  that  they  thought 
there  was.  There  is  absolutely  nothing  to  prevent  a  man  and 
woman  who  used  to  be  married  from  meeting  socially  and  being 
decent  to  each  other,  or  to  prevent  two  men  from  being  decent 
to  each  other  under  such  circumstances.  I  would  not  say  that 
they  should  choose  to  be  intimate  friends — though  even  that 
may  be  possible  occasionally. 

I  know,  because  I  have  seen  it  happen.  In  Holland  I  met  a 
certain  eminent  novelist  and  poet,  a  great  and  lovable  man.  I 
visited  his  home,  and  met  his  wife  and  two  little  children, 
and  saw  a  man  and  woman  living  in  domestic  happiness.  The 
man  had  also  two  grown  sons,  and  after  a  few  days  he 
remarked  that  he  would  like  me  to  meet  the  mother  of  these 
young  men.  We  went  for  a  walk  of  a  mile  or  so,  and  met  a 
lady  who  lived  in  a  small  house  by  herself,  and  who  received  us 
with  a  friendly  welcome  and  talked  with  us  for  a  couple  of 
hours  about  music  and  books  and  art.  This  lady  had  been  the 
writer's  wife  for  ten  years  or  so,  and  there  had  been  a  terrible 
uproar  when  they  volimtarily  parted.    But  they  had  refused  to 


96  Love  and  Society 

pay  attention  to  this  uproar ;  they  understood  why  they  did  not 
wish  to  remain  husband  and  wife  any  longer,  but  they  did  not 
consider  it  necessary  to  quarrel  about  it,  nor  even  to  break  off 
the  friendship  which  their  common  interests  made  possible. 
The  two  women  in  the  case  were  not  intimate,  I  gathered,  but 
they  frequently  met  at  the  homes  of  others,  and  found  no  diffi- 
culty in  being  friendly.  I  suggest  to  Mrs.  Wharton  that  this 
story  is  at  least  as  interesting  as  the  one  she  has  told ;  but  I  fear 
she  will  not  care  to  write  it,  because  apparently  she  considers  it 
necessary  that  people  who  are  well  bred  and  refined  should  be 
the  helpless  victims  of  destructive  manias. 


CHAPTER  XLVII 
THE  RESTRICTION  OF  DIVORCE 

(Discusses  the  circumstances  under  which  society  has  the  right 
to  forbid  divorce,  or  to  impose  limitations  upon  it.) 

We  have  quoted  the  old  maxim,  "Marry  in  haste  and  repent 
at  leisure,"  and  we  suggested  that  parents  and  guardians  should 
have  the  right  to  ask  the  young  to  wait  before  marriage,  and 
make  certain  of  the  state  of  their  hearts.  We  have  now  the 
same  advice  to  give  concerning  divorce;  the  same  claim  to 
enter  on  behalf  of  society — that  it  has  and  should  assert  the 
right  to  ask  people  to  delay  and  think  carefully  before  breaking 
up  a  marriage. 

What  interest  has  society  in  the  restriction  of  divorce? 
What  affair  is  it  of  any  other  person  if  I  choose  to  get  a  divorce 
and  marry  a  new  wife  once  a  month  ?  There  are  many  reasons, 
not  in  any  way  based  upon  religious  superstition  or  conven- 
tional prejudice.  In  the  first  place,  there  are  or  may  be  chil- 
dren, and  society  should  try  to  preserve  for  every  child  a  home 
with  a  father  and  a  mother  in  it.  Second,  there  are  property 
rights,  of  which  every  marriage  is  a  tangle,  and  the  settlement 
of  which  the  law  should  always  oversee.  Third,  there  is  the 
question  of  venereal  disease,  which  society  has  an  unquestion- 
able right  to  keep  down,  by  every  reasonable  restriction  upon 
sexual  promiscuity.  And  finally,  there  is  the  respect  which  all 
men  and  women  owe  to  love.  It  seems  to  me  that  society  has 
the  same  right  to  protect  love  against  extreme  outrage,  as  it  has 
to  forbid  indecent  exposure  of  the  person  on  the  street. 

There  is  in  successful  operation  in  Switzerland  a  wise  and 
sane  divorce  law,  based  upon  common  sense  and  not  upon  super- 
stition. A  couple  wish  to  break  their  marriage,  and  they  go 
before  a  judge,  and  in  private  session,  as  to  a  friendly  adviser, 
they  tell  their  troubles.  He  gives  them  advice  about  their  dis- 
agreement, and  sends  them  away  for  three  months  to  think  it 
over.  At  the  end  of  three  months,  if  they  still  desire  a  divorce, 
they  meet  with  him  again.  If  he  still  thinks  there  is  a  chance 
of  reconciliation,  he  has  the  right  to  require  them  to  wait 
another  three  months.    But  if  at  the  end  of  this  second  period 

97 


98  Love  and  Society 

they  are  still  convinced  that  the  case  is  hopeless,  and  that  they 
should  part,  the  judge  is  required  to  grant  the  divorce.  You 
may  note  that  this  is  exactly  what  I  have  suggested  concerning 
young  couples  who  become  engaged.  In  both  cases,  the  parties 
directly  interested  have  the  right  to  decide  their  own  fate,  but 
the  rest  of  the  world  requires  them  to  think  carefully  about  it, 
and  to  listen  to  counsel.  Except  for  grave  offenses,  such  as 
adultery,  insanity,  crime  or  venereal  disease,  I  do  not  think  that 
anyone  should  receive  a  divorce  in  less  than  six  months,  nor  do 
I  think  that  any  personal  right  in  contravened  by  the  imposing 
of  such  a  delay. 

Next,  what  are  we  going  to  say  to  the  right,  or  the  claim  to 
the  right,  on  the  part  of  a  man  or  woman,  to  be  married  once  a 
year  throughout  a  lifetime  ?  In  order  to  illustrate  this  problem, 
I  will  tell  you  about  a  certain  man  known  to  me.  In  his  early 
life  he  spent  a  couple  of  years  in  a  lunatic  asylum.  He  lays 
claim  to  extraordinary  spiritual  gifts,  and  uses  the  language  of 
the  highest  idealism  known.  He  is  a  man  of  culture  and 
good  family,  and  thus  exerts  a  peculiar  charm  upon  young 
women  of  refinement  and  sensitiveness.  To  my  knowledge  he 
was  three  times  married  in  six  years,  and  each  time  he  deserted 
the  woman,  and  forced  her  to  divorce  him,  and  to  take  care  of 
herself,  and  in  one  case  of  a  child.  In  addition,  he  had  begotten 
one  child  out  of  marriage,  and  left  the  mother  and  child  to 
starve.  For  ten  years  or  so  I  used  to  see  him  about  once  in  six 
months,  and  invariably  he  had  a  new  woman,  a  young  girl  of 
fine  character,  who  had  been  ensnared  by  him,  and  was  in  the 
agonizing  process  of  discovering  his  moral  and  mental  derange- 
ment. Yet  there  was  absolutely  nothing  in  the  law  to  place 
restraint  upon  this  man ;  he  could  wander  from  state  to  state, 
or  to  the  other  side  of  the  world,  preying  upon  lovely  young 
girls  wherever  he  went. 

This  particular  man  happens  to  call  himself  a  "radical" ;  but 
I  could  tell  you  of  similar  men  in  the  highest  social  circles,  or  in 
the  political  world,  the  theatrical  world,  the  "sporting"  world ; 
they  are  in  every  rank  of  life,  and  are  just  as  definitely  and 
certainly  menaces  to  human  welfare,  and  progress  as  pirates  on 
the  high  seas  or  highwaymen  on  the  road.  Nor  are  they  con- 
fined to  the  males ;  the  world  is  full  of  women  who  use  their 
sex  charms  for  predatory  purposes,  and  some  of  them  are  far 
too  clever  for  any  law  that  you  or  I  can  contrive  at  present. 
But  I  think  we  might  begin  by  refusing  to  let  any  man  or 


The  Book  of  Love  99 

woman  have  more  than  two  divorces  in  one  lifetime,  in  any 
state  or  part  of  the  world.  If  any  man  or  woman  tries  three 
times  to  find  happiness  in  love,  and  fails  each  time,  we  have  a 
right  to  assume  that  the  fault  must  lie  with  that  person,  and  not 
with  the  three  partners. 

I  think  we  may  go  further  yet ;  having  made  wise  laws  of 
love  and  marriage,  taking  into  consideration  all  human  needs, 
we  have  a  right  to  require  that  men  and  women  shall  obey  the 
laws.  At  present  the  great  mass  of  the  public  has  sympathy  for 
the  law-breaker;  just  as,  in  old  days,  the  peasants  could  not 
help  admiring  the  outlaw  who  resisted  unjust  land  laws  and 
robbed  the  rich,  or  as  today,  under  the  capitalist  regime,  we  can 
not  withhold  our  sympathy  from  political  prisoners,  even 
though  they  have  committed  acts  of  violence  which  we  deplore. 
But  when  we  have  made  sex  laws  that  we  know  are  just  and 
sensible — then  we  shall  consider  that  we  have  the  right  to 
restrain  sex  criminals,  and  in  extreme  cases  we  shall  avail  our- 
selves of  the  skill  of  science  to  perform  a  surgical  operation 
which  will  render  him  unable  in  future  to  prey  upon  the  love 
needs  of  people  who  are  placed  at  his  mercy  by  their  best 
qualities,  their  unselfishness  and  lack  of  suspicion. 

We  clear  out  foul-smelling  weeds  from  our  garden,  because 
we  wish  to  raise  beautiful  flowers  and  useful  herbs  therein. 
There  lives  in  California  a  student  of  plant  life,  who  has  shown 
us  what  we  can  do,  not  by  magic  or  by  superhuman  efforts, 
but  simply  by  loving  plants,  by  watching  them  ceaselessly, 
understanding  their  ways,  and  guiding  their  sex-life  to  our 
own  purposes.  We  can  perform  what  to  our  ignorant  ancestors 
would  have  seemed  to  be  miracles;  we  can  actually  make  all 
sorts  of  new  plants,  which  will  continue  to  breed  their  own 
kind,  and  survive  forever  if  we  give  them  proper  care.  In 
other  words,  Luther  Burbank  has  shown  us  that  we  can  "change 
plant  nature." 

There  flash  back  upon  my  memory  all  those  dull,  weary, 
sick  human  creatures,  who  have  repeated  to  me  that  dull, 
weary,  sick  old  formula,  "You  cannot  change  human  nature." 
I  do  not  think  I  am  indulging  either  in  religious  superstition 
or  in  blind  optimism,  but  am  speaking  precisely,  in  saying 
that  whenever  human  beings  get  ready  to  apply  experimental 
science  to  themselves,  they  can  change  human  nature  just  as 
they  now  change  plant  nature.  By  putting  human  bodies 
together  in  love,  we  make  new  bodies  of  children  more  beautiful 


100  Love  and  Society 

than  any  who  have  yet  romped  on  the  earth ;  and  in  the  same 
way,  by  putting  minds  and  souls  together,  we  can  make  new 
kinds  of  minds  and  souls,  different  from  those  we  have  pre- 
viously known,  and  greater  than  either  the  man-soul  or  the 
woman-soul  alone. 

Also,  by  that  magic  which  is  the  law  of  mind  and  soul 
life,  each  new  creation  can  be  multiplied  to  infinity,  and  shared 
by  all  other  minds  and  souls  that  live  in  the  present  or  may 
live  in  the  future.  We  have  shown  elsewhere  how  genius 
multiplies  to  infinity  the  joy  and  power  of  life  by  means  of 
the  arts ;  and  one  of  the  greatest  of  the  arts  is  the  art  of  love. 
Consider  the  great  lovers,  the  true  lovers,  of  history — ^how  they 
have  enriched  the  lives  of  us  all.  It  does  not  make  any  dif- 
ference whether  these  men  and  women  lived  in  the  flesh,  or  in 
the  brain  of  a  poet — we  learn  alike  from  Dante  and  Beatrice, 
from  Abelard  and  Heloise,  from  Robert  and  Elizabeth  Brown- 
ing, from  Tristan  and  Isolde,  from  Romeo  and  Juliet,  what  is 
the  depth  and  the  splendor  of  this  passion  which  lies  hidden 
within  us,  and  how  it  may  enrich  and  vivify  and  glorify  all  Hfe. 


PART  FOUR 

THE  BOOK  OF  SOCIETY 


CHAPTER  XLVIII 
THE  EGO  AND  THE  WORLD 

(Discusses  the  beginning  of  consciousness,  in  the  infant  and 
in  primitive  man,  and  the  problem  of  its  adjustment  to  life.) 

We  have  now  to  consider  the  relationship  of  man  to  his 
fellows,  with  whom  he  Hves  in  social  groups.  Upon  this  prob- 
lem floods  of  light  have  been  thrown  by  the  new  science  of 
psycho-analysis.  I  will  try  to  give,  briefly  and  in  simple 
language,  an  idea  of  these  discoveries. 

One  of  the  laws  of  biology  is  that  every  individual,  in  his 
development,  reproduces  the  history  of  the  race;  so  that  im- 
pulses and  mental  states  of  a  child  reveal  to  us  what  our 
far-off  ancestors  loved  and  feared.  The  same  thing  is  dis- 
covered to  be  true  of  neurotics,  people  who  have  failed  in 
adjusting  themselves  to  civilized  hfe,  and  have  gone  back, 
in  some  or  all  of  their  mental  traits,  to  infantile  states.  If 
we  analyze  the  unconscious  minds  of  "nervous  patients,"  and 
compare  them  with  what  we  find  in  the  minds  of  infants, 
and  in  savages,  we  discover  the  same  dreams,  the  same  long- 
ings and  the  same  fears. 

The  mental  life  of  man  begins  in  the  womb.  We  cannot 
observe  that  life  directly,  but  we  know  that  it  is  there,  because 
there  cannot  be  organic  life  without  mind  to  direct  it,  and 
just  as  there  is  an  unconscious  mind  that  regulates  the  bodily 
processes  in  adults,  so  in  the  embryo  there  must  be  an  uncon- 
scious mind  to  direct  the  flow  of  blood,  the  building  of  bones, 
muscle,  eyes  and  brain.  The  mental  life  of  that  unborn  crea- 
ture is  of  course  purely  egotistical;  it  knows  nothing  outside 
itself,  and  it  finds  this  universe  an  agreeable  place — every- 
thing being  supplied  to  it,  promptly  and  perfectly,  without 
effort  of  its  own. 

But  suddenly  it  gets  its  first  shock;  pain  begins,  and 
severe  discomfort,  and  the  creature  is  shoved  out  into  a  cold 
world,  yelling  in  protest  against  the  unsought  change.  And 
from  that  moment  on,  the  new-born  infant  labors  to  adjust 
itself  to  an  entirely  new  set  of  conditions.  Discomforts 
trouble  it,  and  it  cries.   Quickly  it  learns  that  these  cries  are 

103 


104  Love  and  Society 

answered,  and  satisfaction  of  its  needs  is  furnished.  Some- 
how, magically,  things  appear;  warm  and  dry  covering,  a 
trickle  of  delicious  hot  milk  into  its  mouth.  At  first  the  infant 
mind  has  no  idea  how  all  this  happens ;  but  gradually  it  comes 
to  realize  objects  outside  itself,  and  it  forms  the  idea  that 
these  objects  exist  to  serve  its  wants.  Later  on  it  learns  that 
there  are  particular  sounds  which  attach  to  particular  objects, 
and  cause  them  to  function.  The  sound  "Mama,"  for  example, 
produces  a  goddess  clothed  in  beauty  and  power,  perform- 
ing miracles.  So  the  infant  mind  arrives  at  the  "period  of 
magic  gestures"  and  the  "period  of  magic  words" ;  correspond- 
ing to  a  certain  type  of  myth  and  belief  which  we  find  in 
every  race  and  tribe  of  human  being  that  now  exists  or  ever 
has  existed  on  earth.  AU  these  stories  about  magic  wishes  and 
magic  rings  and  magic  spells  of  a  thousand  sorts;  and  no- 
where on  earth  a  child  which  does  not  listen  greedily  to  such 
fancies !  The  reason  is  simply  that  the  child  has  passed 
through  this  stage  of  mental  life,  and  so  recently  that  the  feel- 
ings are  close  to  the  surface  of  his  consciousness. 

But  gradually  the  infant  makes  the  painful  discovery  that 
not  everything  in  existence  can  be  got  to  serve  him;  there 
are  forces  which  are  proof  against  his  magic  spells;  there  are 
some  which  are  hostile,  and  these  the  infant  learns  to  regard 
with  hatred  and  fear.  Sometimes  hatred  and  fear  are 
strangely  mixed  with  admiration  and  love.  For  example, 
there  is  a  powerful  being  known  as  "father,"  who  is  some- 
times good  and  useful,  but  at  other  times  takes  the  atten- 
tion of  the  supremely  useful  "mother,"  the  source  of  food  and 
warmth  and  life.  So  "father"  is  hated,  and  in  fancy  he  is 
wished  out  of  the  way — which  to  the  infant  is  the  same  thing 
as  killing.  Out  of  this  grows  a  whole  universe  of  fascinat- 
ing mental  life,  which  Freud  calls  by  the  name  "the  CEdipus 
complex" — after  the  legend  of  the  Greek  hero  who  murdered 
his  father  and  committed  incest  with  his  mother,  and  then, 
when  he  discovered  what  he  had  done,  put  out  his  own 
eyes.  There  is  a  mass  of  legends,  old  as  human  thought, 
repeating  this  story;  we  cannot  be  sure  whether  they  have 
grown  out  of  the  greeds  and  jealousies  of  this  early  wish-life 
of  the  infant,  or  whether  they  had  their  base  in  the  fact  that 
there  was  a  stage  in  human  progress  in  which  the  father 
really  was  killed  off  by  the  sons. 

This  latter  idea  is  discussed  by  Freud,  in  his  book,  "Totem 


The  Book  of  Society  105 

and  Taboo."  It  appears  that  primitive  man  lived  in  hordes, 
which  were  dominated  by  one  old  male,  who  kept  all  the  wo- 
men to  himself,  and  either  killed  the  young  males,  or  drove 
them  out  to  shift  for  themselves;  so  the  young  men  would 
combine  and  murder  their  father.  The  forming  of  human 
society,  of  marriage  and  the  family,  depended  upon  one  fac- 
tor, the  decision  of  the  young  victors  to  live  and  let  live.  The 
only  way  they  could  do  this  was  to  agree  not  to  quarrel  over 
the  women  of  their  own  group,  but  to  seek  other  women  from 
other  groups.  This  may  account  for  what  is  known  as 
"exogamy,"  an  almost  universal  marriage  custom  of  primitive 
man,  whereby  a  man  named  Jones  is  barred  by  frightful  taboos 
from  the  women  named  Jones,  but  is  permitted  relations  with 
all  the  women  named  Smith. 

To  return  to  our  infant:  he  is  in  the  midst  of  a  painful 
process  of  adjusting  himself  to  the  outside  world ;  discovering 
that  sometimes  all  his  magic  words  and  gestures  fail,  his 
wishes  no  longer  come  true.  There  are  beings  outside  him, 
with  wills  of  their  own,  and  power  to  enforce  them;  he  has 
to  learn  to  get  along  with  these  beings,  and  give  up  his  pleas- 
ures to  theirs.  These  processes  which  go  on  in  the  infant  soul, 
the  hopes  and  the  terrors,  the  griefs  and  the  angers,  are  of  the 
profoundest  significance  for  the  later  adult  life.  For  noth- 
ing gets  out  of  the  mind  that  has  once  got  into  it;  the  infan- 
tile cravings  which  are  repressed  and  forgotten  stay  in  the 
unconscious,  and  work  there,  and  strive  still  for  expression. 
The  conscious  mind  will  not  tolerate  them,  but  they  escape 
in  the  form  of  fairy-tales  and  stories,  of  dreams  and  delu- 
sions, slips  of  the  tongue,  and  many  other  mental  events  which 
it  is  fascinating  to  examine.  Also,  if  we  are  weakened  by 
ill  health  or  nervous  strain,  these  infantile  wishes  may  take 
the  form  of  "neuroses,"  and  fully  grown  people  may  take  to 
stammering,  or  become  impotent,  or  hysterical,  or  even  insane, 
because  of  failures  of  adjustment  to  life  that  happened  when 
they  were  a  year  or  two  old.  These  things  are  known,  not 
merely  as  a  matter  of  theory,  but  because,  as  soon  as  by 
analysis  these  infant  secrets  are  brought  into  consciousness 
and  adjusted  there,  the  trouble  instantly  ceases. 

So  it  appears  that  the  whole  process  of  human  life,  from 
the  very  hour  of  birth,  consists  of  the  correct  adjustment  of 
men  and  women  in  relation  to  their  fellows.  Not  merely  is 
man  a  social  being,  but  all  the  prehuman  ancestors  of  men. 


106  Love  and  Society 

for  ages  upon  geologic  ages,  have  been  social  beings ;  they 
have  lived  in  groups,  and  their  survival  has  depended  upon 
their  success  in  fitting  themselves  snugly  into  group  relation- 
ships. Failure  to  make  correct  adjustments  means  punish- 
ment by  the  group,  or  by  enemies  outside  the  group ;  if  the 
failure  is  serious  enough,  it  means  death.  We  may  assert  that 
the  task  of  understanding  one's  fellow  men,  and  making  one's 
self  understood  by^  them,  is  the  most  important  task  that  con- 
fronts every  individual. 

And  if  we  look  about  the  world  at  present,  the  most  super- 
ficial of  us  cannot  fail  to  realize  that  the  task  is  far  from  being 
correctly  performed.  So  many  people  unhappy,  so  many  striv- 
ing for  what  they  cannot  get!  So  many  having  to  be  locked 
behind  bars,  like  savage  beasts,  because  they  demand  something 
which  the  world  is  resolved  not  to  let  them  have !  So  many 
having  to  be  killed,  by  rifles  and  machine-guns,  by  high  explo- 
sive shells  and  poison  gas — because  they  misunderstood  the 
social  facts  about  them,  and  thought  they  could  fulfill  some 
wishes  which  the  rest  of  mankind  wanted  them  to  repress !  As 
I  read  the  psycho-analyst's  picture  of  the  newly  born  infant 
with  its  primitive  ego,  its  magic  cries  and  magic  gestures,  I  can- 
not be  sure  how  much  of  it  is  sober  science  and  how  much  is 
mordant  irony — a  sketch  of  the  mental  states  of  the  men  and 
women  I  see  about  me — whole  classes  of  men  and  women,  yes, 
even  whole  nations ! 

The  eflfort  of  the  following  chapters  will  be  to  interpret  to 
men  and  women  the  world  which  they  have  made,  and  to  which 
they  are  trying  to  adjust  themselves.  More  especially  we  shall 
try  to  show  how,  by  better  adjustments,  men  may  change  both 
themselves  and  the  world,  and  make  both  into  something  less 
cruel  and  less  painful,  more  serene  and  more  certain  and  more 
free. 


CHAPTER  XLVIX 

COMPETITION  AND  CO-OPERATION 

(Discusses  the  relation  of  the  adult  to  society,  and  the  part 
which  selfishness  and  unselfishness  play  in  the  development  of 
social  life.) 

Pondering  the  subject  of  this  chapter,  I  went  for  a  stroll 
in  the  country,  and  seating  myself  in  a  lonely  place,  became 
lost  in  thought;  when  suddenly  my  eye  was  caught  by  some- 
thing moving.  On  the  bare,  hot,  gray  sand  lay  a  creature 
that  I  could  see  when  it  moved  and  could  not  see  when  it 
was  still,  for  it  was  exactly  the  color  of  the  ground,  and  fitted 
the  ground  tightly,  being  flat,  and  having  its  edges  scalloped 
so  that  they  mingled  with  the  dust.  It  was  a  lizard,  covered 
with  heavy  scales,  and  with  sharp  horns  to  make  it  unattrac- 
tive eating.  At  the  slightest  motion  from  me  it  vanished 
into  a  heap  of  stones,  so  quickly  that  my  eye  could  scarcely 
follow  it. 

This  creature,  you  perceive,  is  in  its  actions  and  its  very 
form  an  expression  of  terror;  terror  of  devouring  enemies, 
of  jackals  that  pounce  and  hawks  that  swoop,  and  also  of  the 
hot  desert  air  that  seeks  to  dry  out  its  few  precious  drops  of 
moisture.  Practically  all  the  energies  of  this  creature  are  con- 
centrated upon  the  securing  of  its  own  individual  survival. 
To  be  sure,  it  will  mate,  but  the  process  will  be  quick,  and 
the  eggs  will  be  left  for  the  sun  to  hatch  out,  and  the  baby 
lizards  will  shift  for  themselves — that  is  to  say,  they  will  be 
incarnations  of  terror  from  the  moment  they  open  their  eyes 
to  the  light. 

The  jackal  seeks  to  pounce  upon  the  lizard,  and  so  inspires 
terror  in  the  lizard;  but  when  you  watch  the  jackal  you  find 
that  it  exhibits  terror  toward  more  powerful  foes.  You  find 
that  the  hawk,  which  swoops  upon  the  lizard,  is  equally  quick 
to  swoop  away  when  it  comes  upon  a  man  with  a  gun.  This 
preying  and  being  preyed  upon,  this  mixture  of  cruelty  and 
terror,  is  a  conspicuous  fact  of  nature;  if  you  go  into  any 
orthodox  school  or  college  in  America  today,  you  will  be 
taught  that  it  is  nature's  most  fundamental  law,  and  gov- 
erns all  living  things.     If  you  should  take  a  course  in  polit- 

107 


108  Love  and  Society 

ical  economy  under  a  respectable  professor,  you  would  find 
him  explaining  that  such  cruelty-terror  applies  equally  in 
human  affairs;  it  is  the  basis  of  all  economic  science,  and 
the  effort  to  escape  from  it  is  like  the  effort  to  lift  yourself 
by  your  boot-straps. 

The  professor  calls  this  cruelty-terror  by  the  name  "com- 
petition"; and  he  creates  for  his  own  purposes  an  abstract 
being  whom  he  names  "the  economic  man,"  a  creature  who 
acts  according  to  this  law,  and  exists  under  these  conditions. 
One  of  the  professor's  formulas  is  the  so-called  "Malthusian 
law,"  that  population  presses  always  upon  the  limits  of  sub- 
sistence. Another  is  "the  law  of  diminishing  returns  of  agri- 
culture," that  you  can  get  only  so  much  product  out  of  a 
certain  piece  of  land,  no  matter  how  much  labor  and  capital 
you  put  into  it.  Another  is  Ricardo's  "iron  law  of  wages," 
that  wages  cannot  rise  above  the  cost  of  living.  Another 
is  embodied  in  the  formula  of  Adam  Smith,  that  "Competi- 
tion is  the  life  of  trade."  The  professor  enunciates  these 
"laws,"  coldly  and  impersonally,  as  becomes  the  scientist;  but 
if  you  go  into  the  world  of  business,  you  find  them  set  forth 
cynically,  in  scores  of  maxims  and  witticisms :  "Dog  eat  dog," 
"the  devil  take  the  hindmost,"  "business  is  business,"  "do 
others  or  they  will  do  you." 

Evidently,  however,  there  is  something  in  man  which  rebels 
against  these  "natural"  laws.  In  our  present  society  man 
has  set  aside  six  days  in  the  week  in  which  to  live  under 
them,  and  one  day  in  the  week  in  which  to  preach  an  entirely 
different  and  contradictory  code — that  of  Christian  ethics, 
which  bids  you  "love  your  neighbor,"  and  "do  unto  others  as 
you  would  they  should  do  unto  you."  Between  these  Sun- 
day teachings  and  the  week-day  teachings  there  is  eternal  con- 
flict, and  one  who  takes  pleasure  in  ridiculing  his  fellow  men 
can  find  endless  opportunity  here.  The  Sunday  preachers  are 
forbidden  to  interfere  with  the  affairs  of  the  other  six  days; 
that  is  called  "dragging  politics  into  the  pulpit."  On  the  other 
hand,  incredible  as  it  may  seem,  there  are  professors  of  the 
week-day  doctrine  who  call  themselves  Christians,  and  be- 
lieve in  the  Sunday  doctrine,  too.  They  manage  this  by  putting 
the  Sunday  doctrine  off  into  a  future  world;  that  is,  we  are 
to  pounce  upon  one  another  and  devour  one  another  under 
the  "iron  laws"  of  economics  so  long  as  we  live  on  earth, 
but  in  the  next  world  we  shall  play  on  golden  harps  and  have 


The  Book  of  Society  109 

nothing  to  do  but  love  one  another.  If  anybody  is  so  foolish 
as  to  apply  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  to  present-day  affairs, 
we  regard  him  as  a  harmless  crank;  if  he  persists,  and  sets 
out  to  teach  others,  we  call  him  a  Communist  or  a  Pacifist, 
and  put  him  in  jail  for  ten  or  twenty  years. 

In  the  Book  of  the  Mind,  I  have  referred  to  Kropotkin's 
"Mutual  Aid  as  a  Factor  in  Evolution,"  which  I  regard  as 
one  of  the  epoch-making  books  of  our  time.  Kropotkin 
clearly  proves  that  competition  is  not  the  only  law  of  nature, 
it  is  everywhere  modified  by  co-operation,  and  in  the  great 
majority  of  cases  co-operation  plays  a  larger  part  in  the 
relations  of  living  creatures  than  competition.  There  is  no 
creature  in  existence  which  is  entirely  selfish;  in  the  nature 
of  the  case  such  a  creature  could  not  exist — save  in  the 
imaginations  of  teachers  of  special  privilege.  If  a  species 
is  to  survive,  some  portion  of  the  energies  of  the  individual 
must  go  into  reproduction;  and  steadily,  as  life  advances,  we 
find  the  amount  of  this  sacrifice  increasing.  The  higher  the 
type  of  the  creature,  the  longer  is  the  period  of  infancy,  and 
the  greater  the  sacrifice  of  the  parent  for  the  young.  Like- 
wise, most  creatures  make  the  discovery  that  by  staying 
together  in  herds  or  groups,  and  learning  to  co-operate  instead 
of  competing  among  themselves,  they  increase  their  chances 
of  survival.  You  find  birds  that  live  in  flocks,  and  other 
birds,  like  hawks  and  owls  and  eagles,  that  are  solitary;  and 
you  find  the  co-operating  birds  a  thousand  times  as  numerous 
— ^that  is  to  say,  a  thousand  times  as  successful  in  the  strug- 
gle for  survival.  You  find  that  all  man's  brain  power  has 
been  a  social  product ;  the  supremacy  he  has  won  over  nature 
has  depended  upon  one  thing  and  one  alone — ^the  fact  that 
he  has  managed  to  become  different  from  the  "economic  man," 
that  product  of  the  imagination  of  the  defenders  of  privilege. 

It  is  evident  that  both  competition  and  co-operation  are 
necessary  to  every  individual,  and  the  health  of  the  individual 
and  of  the  race  lies  in  the  proper  combination  of  the  two.  If 
a  creature  were  wholly  unselfish — if  it  made  no  effort  to 
look  after  its  own  individual  welfare — it  would  be  exter- 
minated before  it  had  a  chance  to  reproduce.  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  it  cannot  learn  to  co-operate,  its  progeny  stand  less 
chance  of  survival  against  creatures  which  have  learned  this 
important  lesson.  We  have  a  nation  of  a  110,000,000  people, 
who  have  learned  to  co-operate  to  a  certain  limited  extent. 


110  "LoYE  AND  Society 

Some  of  us  realize  how  vastly  the  happiness  of  these  millions 
might  be  increased  by  a  further  extension  of  co-operation; 
but  we  find  ourselves  opposed  by  the  professors  of  privilege 
— and  we  wish  that  these  gentlemen  would  go  out  and  join 
the  lizards  of  the  desert  sands  or  the  sharks  of  the  sea, 
creatures  which  really  practice  the  system'  of  "laissez  faire" 
which  the  professors  teach. 

The  plain  truth  is  that  we  cannot  make  a  formula  out  of 
either  competition  or  co-operation.  We  cannot  settle  any 
problem  of  economics,  of  business  or  legislation,  by  proclaim- 
ing, for  example,  that  "Competition  is  the  life  of  trade." 
Competition  may  just  as  well  turn  out  to  be  the  death  of 
trade;  it  depends  entirely  upon  the  kind  of  competition,  and 
the  stage  of  trade  development  to  which  it  is  applied.  In  the 
early  eighteenth  century,  when  that  formula  of  Adam  Smith 
was  written,  competition  was  observed  to  keep  down  prices 
and  provide  stimulus  to  enterprise,  and  so  to  further  abun- 
dant production.  But  the  time  came  when  the  machinery  for 
producing  goods  was  in  excess,  not  merely  of  the  needs  of 
the  country,  but  of  the  available  foreign  markets,  and  then 
suddenly  the  large-scale  manufacturers  made  the  discovery 
that  competition  was  the  death  of  trade  to  them.  They  pro- 
ceeded, as  a  matter  of  practical  common  sense,  and  without 
consulting  their  college  professors,  to  abolish  competition  by 
forming  trusts.  We  passed  laws  forbidding  them  to  do  this, 
but  they  simply  refused  to  obey  the  laws.  In  the  United 
States  they  have  made  good  their  refusal  for  thirty-five  years, 
and  in  the  end  have  secured  the  blessing  of  the  Supreme 
Court  upon  their  course. 

So  now  we  have  co-operation  in  large-scale  production  and 
marketing.  It  is  known  by  various  names,  "pools,"  "syndi- 
cates," "price-fixing,"  "gentlemen's  agreements."  It  is  a  bless- 
ing for  those  who  co-operate,  but  it  proves  to  be  the  death 
of  those  who  labor,  and  also  of  those  who  consume,  and  we 
see  these  also  compelled  to  combine,  forming  labor  unions 
and  consumers'  societies.  Each  side  to  the  quarrel  insists 
that  the  other  side  is  committing  a  crime  in  refusing  to  com- 
pete, and  our  whole  social  life  is  rent  with  dissensions  over 
this  issue.  Manifestly,  we  need  to  clear  our  minds  of  dead 
doctrines;  to  think  out  clearly  just  what  we  mean  by  com- 
petition, and  what  by  co-operation,  and  what  is  the  proper 
balance  between  the  two. 


The  Book  of  Society  111 

I  have  been  at  pains  in  this  book  to  provide  a  basis  for 
the  deciding  of  such  questions.  It  is  a  practical  problem,  the 
fostering  of  human  life  and  the  furthering  of  its  develop- 
ment. We  cannot  lay  down  any  fixed  rule ;  we  have  to  study 
the  facts  of  each  case  separately.  We  shall  say,  this  kind 
of  comjjetition  is  right,  because  it  helps  to  protect  human  life 
and  to  develop  its  powers.  We  shall  say,  this  other  kind 
of  competition  is  wrong  because  it  has  the  opposite  effect. 
We  shall  say,  perhaps,  that  some  kind  was  right  fifty  years 
ago,  or  even  ten  years  ago,  because  it  then  had  certain 
effects;  but  meantime  some  factor  has  changed,  and  it  is 
now  having  a  different  effect,  and  therefore  ought  to  be 
abolished. 

There  has  never  been  any  kind  of  human  competition 
which  men  did  not  judge  and  modify  in  that  way;  there  is 
no  field  of  human  activity  in  which  ethical  codes  do  not 
condemn  certain  practices  as  unfair.  The  average  English- 
man considers  it  proper  that  two  men  who  get  into  a  dispute 
shall  pull  off  their  coats,  and  settle  the  question  at  issue  by 
pummeling  each  other's  noses.  But  let  one  of  these  men 
strike  his  opponent  in  the  groin,  or  let  him  kick  his  shins, 
and  instantly  there  will  be  a  howl  of  execration.  Likewise, 
an  Anglo-Saxon  man  who  fights  with  the  fists  has  a  loath- 
ing for  a  Sicilian  or  Greek  or  other  Mediterranean  man  who 
will  pull  a  knife.  That  kind  of  competition  is  barred  among 
our  breeds ;  and  also  the  kind  which  consists  of  using  poisons, 
or  of  starting  slanders  against  your  opponent. 

If  you  look  back  through  history,  you  find  many  forms 
of  competition  which  were  once  eminently  respectable,  but 
now  have  been  outlawed.  There  was  a  time,  for  example, 
when  the  distinction  we  draw  between  piracy  and  sea-war  was 
wholly  unknown.  The  ships  of  the  Vikings  would  go  out  and 
raid  the  ships  and  seaports  of  other  peoples,  and  carry  off 
booty  and  captives,  and  the  men  who  did  that  were  sung  as 
heroes  of  the  nation.  The  British  sea-captains  of  the  time 
of  Queen  Elizabeth — Drake,  Frobisher,  and  the  rest  of  them 
— are  portrayed  in  our  school  books  as  valiant  and  hardy  men, 
and  the  British  colonies  were  built  on  the  basis  of  their  activ- 
ities; yet,  according  to  the  sea  laws  in  force  today,  they 
were  pirates.  We  regard  a  cannibal  race  with  abhorrence; 
yet  there  was  a  time  when  all  the  vigorous  races  of  men 
were   cannibals,   and   the   habit   of    eating  your   enemies   in 


112  Love  and  Society 

battle  may  well  have  given  an  advantage  to  the  races  which 
practiced  it. 

On  the  other  hand,  you  find  sentimental  people  who  reject 
all  competition  on  principle,  and  would  like  to  abolish  every 
trace  of  it  from  society,  and  especially  from  education.  But 
stop  and  consider  for  a  moment  what  that  would  mean.  Would 
you  abolish,  for  example,  the  competition  of  love,  the  right 
of  a  man  to  win  the  girl  he  wants?  You  could  not  do  it, 
of  course;  but  if  you  could,  you  would  abolish  one  of  the 
principal  methods  by  which  our  race  has  been  improved. 
Of  course,  what  you  really  want  is,  not  to  abolish  competi- 
tion in  love,  but  to  raise  it  to  a  higher  form.  There  is  an 
old  saying,  "All's  fair  in  love  and  war,"  but  no  one  ever 
meant  that.  You  would  not  admit  that  a  man  might  com- 
pete in  love  by  threatening  to  kill  the  girl  if  she  preferred  a 
rival.  You  would  not  admit  that  he  might  compete  by  poison- 
ing the  other  man.  You  would  not  admit  that  he  might  com- 
pete by  telling  falsehoods  about  the  other  man.  On  the  other 
hand,  if  you  are  sensible,  you  admit  that  he  has  a  right  to 
compete  by  making  his  character  known  to  the  girl,  and  if 
the  other  man  is  a  rascal,  by  telling  the  girl  that. 

Would  you  abolish  the  competition  of  art,  the  effort  of 
men  to  produce  work  more  beautiful  and  inspiring  than 
has  ever  been  known  before?  Would  you  abolish  the  effort 
of  scientists  to  overthrow  theories  which  have  hitherto  been 
accepted?  Obviously  not.  You  make  these  forms  of  com- 
petition seem  better  by  calling  them  "emulation,"  but  you  do 
not  in  the  least  modify  the  fact  that  they  involve  the  right 
of  one  person  to  outdo  other  persons,  to  supplant  them  and 
take  away  something  from  them,  whether  it  be  property  or 
position  or  love  or  fame  or  power.  In  that  sense,  competition 
is  indeed  the  law  of  life,  and  you  might  as  well  reconcile 
yourself  to  it,  and  learn  to  play  your  part  with  spirit  and 
good  humor. 

Also,  you  might  as  well  train  your  children  to  it.  You 
■will  find  you  cannot  develop  their  powers  to  the  fullest  with- 
out competition;  in  fact,  you  will  be  forced  to  go  back  and 
utilize  forms  of  competition  which  are  now  out  of  date  among 
adults.  I  have  told  in  the  Book  of  the  Body  how  I  myself 
tried  for  ten  years  or  more  to  live  without  physical  competi- 
tion, and  discovered  that  I  could  not;  I  have  had  to  take  up 
some  form  of  sport,  and  hundreds  of  thousands  of  other  men 


The  Book  of  Society  113 

have  had  the  same  experience.  What  is  sport?  It  is  a  deHb- 
erate  going  back,  under  carefully  devised  rules,  to  the  savage 
struggles  of  our  ancestors.  The  very  essence  of  real  sport 
is  that  the  contestants  shall,  within  the  rules  laid  down, 
compete  with  each  other  to  the  limit  of  their  powers.  With 
what  contempt  would  a  player  of  tennis  or  baseball  or  whist 
regard  the  proposition  that  his  opponent  should  be  merciful 
to  him,  and  let  him  win  now  and  then!  Obviously,  these 
things  have  no  place  in  the  game,  and  to  be  a  "good  sport" 
is  to  conform  to  the  rules,  and  take  with  enjoyment  what- 
ever issue  of  the  struggle  may  come. 

But  then  again,  suppose  you  are  competing  with  a  child; 
obviously,  the  conditions  are  different.  You  no  longer  play 
the  best  you  can,  you  let  the  child  win  a  part  of  the  time; 
but  you  do  not  let  the  child  know  this,  or  it  would  spoil  the 
fun  for  the  child.  You  pretend  to  try  as  hard  as  you  know 
how,  and  you  cry  out  in  grief  when  you  are  beaten,  and  the 
child  crows  with  delight.  And  yet,  that  does  not  keep  you 
from  loving  the  child,  or  the  child  from  loving  you. 

The  purpose  of  this  elaborate  exposition  is  to  make  clear 
the  very  vital  point  that  a  certain  set  of  social  acts  may  be 
right  under  some  conditions,  and  desperately  wrong  under 
other  conditions.  They  may  be  rfght  in  play,  and  not  in 
serious  things ;  they  may  be  right  in  youth,  and  not  in  matur- 
ity; they  may  be  right  at  one  period  of  the  world's  develop- 
ment, while  at  another  period  they  are  destructive  of  social 
existence.  If,  therefore,  we  wish  to  know  what  are  right 
and  wrong  actions  in  the  affairs  of  men,  if  we  wish  to  judge 
any  particular  law  or  political  platform  or  program  of  busi- 
ness readjustment,  the  first  thing  we  have  to  do  is  to  acquire 
a  mass  of  facts  concerning  the  society  to  which  the  law  or 
platform  or  program  is  to  be  applied.  We  need  to  ask  our- 
selves, exactly  what  will  be  the  effect  of  that  change,  applied 
in  that  particular  way  at  that  particular  time.  In  order  to 
decide  accurately,  we  need  to  know  the  previous  stages  through 
which  that  society  has  passed,  the  forces  which  have  been 
operating  in  it,  and  the  ways  in  which  they  have  worked. 

But  also  we  must  realize  that  the  lessons  of  history  cannot 
ever  be  accepted  blindly.  The  "principles  of  the  founders" 
apply  to  us  only  in  modified  form;  for  the  world  in  which 
we  live  today  is  different  from  any  world  which  has  ever  been 
before,  and  the  world  tomorrow  will  bt  different  yet.     We 


114  LoTE  AND  Society 

are  the  makers  of  it,  and  the  masters  of  it,  and  what  it  will 
be  depends  to  some  extent  upon  our  choice.  In  fact,  that 
is  the  most  important  lesson  of  all  for  us  to  learn;  the  final 
purpose  of  all  our  thought  about  the  world  is  to  enable  us 
to  make  it  a  happier  and  a  better  world  for  ourselves  and 
our  posterity  to  live  in. 


CHAPTER  L 

ARISTOCRACY  AND  DEMOCRACY 

(Discusses  the  idea  of  superior  classes  and  races,  and  whether 
there  is  a  natural  basis  for  such  a  doctrine.) 

In  the  letters  of  Thomas  Jefferson  is  found  the  follow- 
ing passage: 

"All  eyes  are  open  or  opening  to  the  rights  of  man.  The 
general  spread  of  the  light  of  science  has  already  laid  open 
to  every  view  the  palpable  truth  that  the  mass  of  mankind 
has  not  been  born  with  saddles  on  their  backs,  nor  a  favored, 
few  booted  and  spurred,  ready  to  ride  them  legitimately,  by 
the  grace  of  God." 

This,  which  Jefferson,  over  a  hundred  years  ago,  described 
as  a  "palpable  truth,"  is  still  a  long  way  from  prevailing  in 
the  world.  We  are  trying  in  this  book  not  to  take  anything 
for  granted,  so  we  do  not  assume  this  truth,  but  investigate 
it;  and  we  begin  by  admitting  that  there  are  many  facts 
which  seem  to  contradict  it,  and  which  make  it  more  difficult 
of  proof  than  Jefferson  realized.  It  is  not  enough  to  point 
out  the  lack  of  saddles  on  the  backs,  and  of  boots  and  spurs 
on  the  feet  of  newly  born  infants;  for  the  fact  is  that  men 
are  not  exploited  because  of  saddles,  nor  is  the  exploiting 
accomplished  by  means  of  boots  and  spurs.  It  is  done  by 
means  of  gold  and  steel,  banks  and  credit  systems,  railroads, 
machine-guns  and  battleships.  And  while  it  is  not  true  that 
certain  races  and  classes  are  born  with  these  things  on  them, 
they  are  bom  to  the  possession  of  them,  and  the  vast  major- 
ity of  mankind  are  without  them  all  their  lives,  and  without 
the  ability  to  use  them  even  if  they  had  them. 

The  doctrine  that  "all  men  are  created  equal,"  or  that 
they  ought  to  be  equal,  we  shall  describe  for  convenience  as 
the  democratic  doctrine.  It  first  came  to  general  attention 
through  Christianity,  which  proclaimed  the  brotherhood  of 
all  mankind  in  a  common  fatherhood  of  God.  But  even  as 
taught  by  the  Christians,  the  doctrine  had  startling  limita- 
tions. It  was  several  centuries  before  a  church  council  sum- 
moned the  courage  to  decide  that  women  were  human  beings^ 

115 


116  Love  and  Society 

and  had  souls;  and  today  many  devout  Christians  are  still 
uncertain  whether  Japanese  and  Chinese  and  Filipinos  and 
Negroes  are  human  beings,  and  have  souls.  I  have  heard  old 
gentlemen  in  the  South  gravely  maintain  that  the  Negro  is 
not  a  human  being  at  all,  but  a  different  species  of  animal. 
I  have  heard  learned  men  in  the  South  set  forth  that  the 
sutures  in  the  Negro  skull  close  at  some  very  early  age,  and 
thus  make  moral  responsibility  impossible  for  the  black  race. 
And  you  will  find  the  same  ideas  maintained,  not  merely  as 
to  differences  of  race  and  color,  but  as  to  differences  of  eco- 
nomic condition.  You  will  find  the  average  aristocratic  Eng- 
lishman quite  convinced  that  the  "lower  orders"  are  perma- 
nently inferior  to  himself,  and  this  though  they  are  of  the 
same  Anglo-Saxon  stock. 

For  convenience  I  will  refer  to  the  doctrine  that  there  is 
some  natural  and  irremovable  inferiority  of  certain  races  or 
classes,  as  the  aristocratic  doctrine.  I  will  probably  startle 
some  of  my  readers  by  making  the  admission  that  if  there 
is  any  such  natural  or  irremovable  inferiority,  then  a  belief 
in  political  or  economic  equality  is  a  blunder.  If  there  are 
certain  classes  or  races  which  cannot  think,  or  cannot  learn 
to  think  as  well  as  other  classes  and  races,  those  mentally 
inferior  classes  and  races  will  obey,  and  they  will  be  made 
to  obey,  and  neither  you  nor  I,  nor  all  the  preachers  and 
agitators  in  the  world,  will  ever  be  able  to  arrange  it  other- 
wise. Suppose  we  could  do  it,  we  should  be  committing  a 
crime  against  life;  we  should  be  holding  down  the  race  and 
aborting  its  best  development. 

Is  there  any  such  natural  and  irremovable  inferiority  in 
human  beings?  When  we  come  to  study  the  question  we 
find  it  complicated  by  a  different  phenomenon,  that  of  racial 
immaturity,  which  we  have  to  face  frankly  and  get  clear  in 
our  minds.  One  of  the  most  obvious  facts  of  nature  is  that 
of  infancy  and  childhood.  We  have  just  pointed  out  that 
if  you  are  competing  with  a  child,  you  do  it  in  an  entirely 
different  way  and  under  an  entirely  different  set  of  rules,  and 
if  you  fail  to  do  this,  you  are  unfair  and  even  crwel  to  the 
child.  And  it  is  a  fact  of  our  world  that  there  are  some 
races  more  backward  in  the  scale  of  development  than  other 
races.  You  may  not  like  this  fact,  but  it  is  silly  to  try  to 
evade  it.  People  who  live  in  savage  huts  and  beat  on  tom- 
toms and  fight  with  bows  and  arrows  and  cannot  count  be- 


The  Book  of  Society  117 

yond  a  dozen — such  people  are  not  the  mental  or  moral 
equals  of  our  highly  civilized  races,  and  to  treat  them  as  equals, 
and  compete  with  them  on  that  basis,  means  simply  to  exter- 
minate them.  And  we  should  either  exterminate  them  at  once 
and  be  done  with  it,  or  else  make  up  our  minds  that  they 
are  in  a  childhood  stage  of  our  race,  and  that  we  have  to 
guide  them  and  teach  them  as  we  do  our  children. 

There  is  no  more  useful  person  than  the  wise  and  kind 
teacher.  But  suppose  we  saw  some  one  pretending  to  be  a 
teacher  to  our  children,  while  in  reality  enslaving  and  exploit- 
ing them,  or  secretly  robbing  and  corrupting  them — what 
would  we  say  about  that  kind  of  teacher?  The  name  of  that 
teacher  is  capitalist  commercialism,  and  his  profession  is 
known  as  "the  white  man's  burden";  his  abuse  of  power  is 
the  cause  of  our  present  racial  wars  and  revolts  of  subject 
peoples.  A  fair-minded  man,  desirous  of  facing  all  the  facts 
of  life,  hardly  knows  what  stand  to  take  in  such  a  controversy ; 
that  is,  hardly  knows  from  which  cause  the  colored  races  suf- 
fer more — ^the  white  man's  exploitation,  or  their  own  native 
immaturity. 

To  say  that  certain  races  are  in  a  childhood  stage,  and 
need  instruction  and  discipline,  is  an  entirely  different  thing 
from  saying  they  are  permanently  inferior  and  incapable  of 
self-government.  Whether  they  are  permanently  inferior  is 
a  problem  for  the  man  of  science,  to  be  determined  by  psy- 
chological tests,  continued  possibly  over  more  than  one  gener- 
ation. We  have  not  as  yet  made  a  beginning;  in  fact,  we 
have  not  even  acquired  the  scientific  impartiality  necessary 
to  such  an  inquiry. 

In  the  meantime,  all  that  we  can  do  is  to  look  about  us 
and  pick  up  hints  where  we  can.  In  places  like  Massachu- 
setts, where  Negroes  are  allowed  to  go  to  college  and  are 
given  a  chance  to  show  what  they  can  do,  they  have  not  ousted 
the  white  man,  but  many  of  them  have  certainly  won  his  re- 
spect, and  one  finds  charming  and  cultured  men  among  them, 
who  show  no  signs  of  prematurely  closed  up  skulls.  And  one 
after  another  we  see  the  races  which  have  been  held  down 
as  being  inferior,  developing  leadership  and  organization  and 
power  of  moral  resistance.  The  Irish  are  showing  themselves 
today  one  of  the  most  vigorous  and  high-spirited  of  all  races. 
The  Hindus  are  developing  a  movement  which  in  the  long 
run  may  prove  more  powerful  than  the  white  man's  gold  and 


118  Love  and  Society 

steel.  The  Egyptians,  the  Persians,  the  Filipinos,  the  Koreans, 
are  all  devising  ways  to  break  the  power  of  capitalist  news- 
paper censorship.  How  sad  that  the  subject  races  of  the 
world  have  to  get  their  education  through  hatred  of  their 
teachers,  instead  of  through  love! 

Of  course,  these  rebel  leaders  are  men  who  have  absorbed 
the  white  man's  culture,  at  least  in  part;  practically  always 
they  are  of  the  younger  generation,  which  has  been  to  the 
white  man's  schools.  But  this  is  the  very  answer  we  have 
been  seeking — as  to  whether  the  race  is  permanently  inferior, 
or  merely  immature  and  in  need  of  training.  It  is  not  only 
among  the  brown  and  black  and  yellow  races  that  progress 
depends  upon  the  young  generations;  that  is  a  universal  fact 
of  life. 

In  the  course  of  this  argument  we  shall  assume  that  the 
Christian  or  democratic  theory  has  the  weight  of  probability 
on  its  side,  and  that  nature  has  not  created  any  permanently 
and  necessarily  inferior  race  or  class.  We  shall  assume  that 
the  heritage  of  culture  is  a  common  heritage,  open  to  all  our 
species.  We  shall  not  go  so  far  as  the  statement  which  Jef- 
ferson wrote  into  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  that  "all 
men  are  created  free  and  equal" ;  but  we  shall  assert  that  they 
are  created  "with  certain  inalienable  rights,"  and  that  among 
these  is  the  right  to  maintain  their  lives  and  to  strive  for 
liberty  and  happiness.  Also,  we  shall  say  that  there  will 
never  be  peace  or  order  in  the  world  until  they  have  found 
liberty,  and  recognition  of  their  right  to  happiness. 


CHAPTER  LI 

RULING  CLASSES 

(Deals  with  authority  in  human  society,  how  it  is  obtained, 
and  what   sanction   it   can  claim.) 

It  is  possible  to  conceive  an  order  of  nature  in  which  all 
individuals  were  born  and  developed  exactly  alike  and  with 
exactly  equal  powers.  Such  is  apparently  the  case  with  lower 
animals,  for  example  the  ants  and  the  bees.  But  among  hu- 
man beings  there  are  great  differences;  some  are  born  idiots 
and  some  are  born  geniuses.  Even  supposing  that  we  are  able 
to  do  away  with  blindness  and  idiocy,  it  is  not  likely  that  we 
can  ever  make  a  race  of  uniform  genius.  There  will  always 
be  some  more  capable  minds,  who  will  discover  new  powers 
of  life,  and  will  compel  the  others  to  learn  from  them.  It 
is  to  the  interest  of  the  race  that  this  learning  should  be  done 
as  quickly  as  possible.  In  other  words,  the  great  problem  of 
society  is  how  to  recognize  superior  minds  and  put  them  in 
authority. 

We  look  back  over  history,  and  discover  a  few  wise  men, 
and  many  rulers;  but  very,  very  rarely  does  it  happen  tha*^^ 
the  ruler  is  a  wise  man,  or  a  friend  of  wise  men.  Far  more 
often  we  find  the  ruler  occupied  in  suppressing  the  wise  man 
and  his  wisdom.  There  was  a  ruler  who  allowed  the  mob 
to  crucify  Jesus,  and  another  who  ordered  Socrates  to  drink 
the  hemlock,  and  another  who  tortured  Galileo,  and  another 
who  chopped  off  the  head  of  Sir  Walter  Raleigh — and  so  on 
through  a  long  and  tragic  chronicle.  And  even  when  the 
accident  of  a  wise  ruler  occurs  he  is  apt  to  be  surrounded 
by  a  class  of  parasites  and  corrupt  officials  who  are  busy  to 
thwart  his  will. 

The  general  run  of  history  is  this:  some  group  seizes 
power  by  force,  and  holds  it  by  the  same  means,  and  seeks 
to  augment  and  perpetuate  it.  Those  who  win  the  power 
are  frequently  men  of  energy  and  practical  sense,  and  do 
fairly  well  as  governors;  but  they  are  never  able  to  hand  on 
their  virtues,  and  their  line  becomes  corrupted  by  sensuality 
and  self-indulgence,  and  the  subject  classes  are  plundered  and 
driven  to  revolt.     Often  the  revolt  fails,  but  in  the  course 

119 


120  Love  and  Society 

of  time  it  succeeds,  and  there  is  a  new  dynasty,  or  a  new 
ruling  class,  sometimes  a  little  better  than  the  old,  sometimes 
worse. 

How  shall  one  judge  whether  the  new  regime  is  better 
or  worse?  Obviously,  this  is  a  most  important  question;  it 
has  to  do,  not  merely  with  history,  but  with  our  daily  affairs, 
our  voting.  As  one  who  has  read  some  tens  of  thousands  of 
pages  of  history,  and  has  pondered  its  lessons  with  heart-sick- 
ness and  despair,  I  lay  down  this  general  law  by  which  revolts 
and  changes  of  power  may  be  judged:  If  the  change  results 
in  the  holding  of  power  by  a  smaller  number  of  people,  it  is 
a  reaction ;  but  if  the  change  results  in  distributing  the  power 
among  a  larger  group  of  the  community,  then  that  community 
has  made  a  step  in  advance. 

I  have  seen  a  sketch  of  the  history  of  some  Central  Amer- 
ican country — Guatemala,  I  think— ^which  showed  130  revo- 
lutions in  less  than  a  hundred  years.  Some  rascal  gets 
together  a  gang,  and  seizes  the  government  and  plunders  its 
revenue.  When  he  lias  plundered  too  much,  some  other  ras- 
cal stirs  up  the  people,  and  gets  together  another  gang.  Such 
"revolutions"  we  regard  as  subjects  for  comic  opera,  and  for 
the  Richard  Harding  Davis  type  of  fiction ;  but  we  do  not 
consider  them  as  having  any  relationship  to  progress.  We 
describe  them  as  "palace"  revolutions. 

But  compare  with  this  the  various  English  revolutions. 
We  write  learned  histories  about  them,  and  describe  England 
as  "the  Mother  of  Parliaments."  The  reason  for  this  is  that 
when  there  was  political  discontent  in  England,  the  protest- 
ing persons  proceeded  to  organize  thenvselves,  and  to  under- 
stand their  trouble  and  to  remedy  it.  They  had  the  brain 
power  to  do  this;  they  maintained  their  right  to  do  it,  and 
when  by  violence  or  threats  of  violence  they  forced  the  ruling 
class  to  give  way,  they  brought  about  a  wider  extension  of 
liberty,  a  wider  distribution  of  power.  Tennyson  has  pic- 
tured England  as  a  state  "where  freedom  slowly  broadens 
down  from  precedent  to  precedent."  We  today,  reading  its 
history,  are  inclined  to  put  a  sarcastic  emphasis  on  the  word 
"slowly";  but  Tennyson  would  answer  that  it  is  better  for  a 
community  to  move  forward  slowly  than  to  move  forward 
rapidly  and  then  move  backward  nearly  as  far. 

We  have  pointed  out  several  times  the  important  fact  of 
biology  that  change  does  not  necessarily  mean  progress  from 


The  Book  of  Society  121 

any  rational  or  moral  point  of  view.  Degeneration  is  just 
as  real  a  fact  as  progress,  and  it  does  not  at  all  follow  that 
because  things  change  they  are  changing  for  the  better.  It 
is  worth  while  to  repeat  this  in  discussing  human  society,  for 
it  is  just  as  true  of  governments  and  morals  as  of  living  spe- 
cies. A  nation  may  pile  up  wealth,  and  multiply  a  hundred- 
fold the  machinery  of  wealth  production,  and  only  be  increas- 
ing luxury  and  wantonness  and  graft.  A  nation  may  change 
its  governmental  forms,  its  laws  and  social  conventions,  and 
boast  noisily  of  these  changes  in  the  name  of  progress,  while 
as  a  matter  of  fact  it  is  following  swiftly  the  road  to  ruin 
which  all  the  empires  of  history  have  traced.  So  far  as  I 
can  discover,  there  is  one  test,  and  only  one,  by  which  you 
can  judge,  and  that  is  the  test  already  indicated :  Is  the  actual, 
effective  power  of  the  state  wielded  by  a  larger  or  a  smaller 
percentage  of  the  population  than  before  the  change  took 
place  ? 

You  will  note  the  words  "actual,  effective  power."  Noth- 
ing is  more  familiar  in  human  life  than  for  forms  to  survive 
after  the  spirit  which  created  them  is  dead;  and  nothing  is 
more  familiar  than  the  use  of  these  forms  as  masks  to  deceive 
the  populace.  There  have  been  many  times  in  history  when 
people  have  gone  on  voting,  long  after  their  votes  ceased  to 
count  for  anything;  there  have  been  many  times  when  people 
have  gone  through  the  motions  of  freedom  long  after  they 
have  been  slaves.  Mexico  under  Diaz  had  one  of  the  most 
perfect  of  constitutions,  and  was  in  reality  one  of  the  most 
perfect  of  despotisms;  and  we  Americans  are  sadly  familiar 
with  political  democracies  which  do  not  work. 

Shall  we,  therefore,  join  the  pessimists  and  say  that  his- 
tory is  a  blind  struggle  for  useless  power,  and  that  the  notion 
of  progress  is  a  delusion?  I  do  not  think  so;  on  the  con- 
trary, I  think  it  is  easily  to  be  demonstrated  that  there  has 
been  a  steady  increase  in  the  amount  of  knowledge  possessed 
by  the  race,  and  in  the  spread  of  this  knowledge  among  the 
whole  population.  I  think  that  through  most  of  the  period 
of  written  history  we  can  trace  a  real  development  in  human 
society.  I  think  we  can  analyze  the  laws  of  this  development, 
and  explain  its  methods;  and  I  think  this  knowledge  is  pre- 
cious to  us,  because  it  enables  us  to  accelerate  the  process  and 
to  make  the  end  more  certain.  This  task,  the  analysis  of 
social  evolution,  is  the  task  we  have  next  to  undertake. 


CHAPTER  LII 
THE  PROCESS  OF   SOCIAL  EVOLUTION 

(Discusses  the  series  of  changes  through  which  human  so- 
ciety has  passed.) 

We  have  now  to  consider,  briefly,  the  history  of  man  as 
a  social  being,  the  groups  he  has  formed,  and  the  changes  in 
his  group  systems.  Everything  in  life  grows,  and  human  so- 
cieties are  no  exception  to  the  rule.  They  have  undergone 
a  long  process  of  evolution,  which  we  can  trace  in  detail, 
and  which  we  find  conforms  exactly  to  the  law  laid  down  by 
Herbert  Spencer;  a  process  whereby  a  number  of  single  and 
similar  things  become  different  parts  of  one  complex  thing. 
In  the  case  of  human  societies  the  units  are  men  and  women, 
and  social  evolution  is  a  process  whereby  a  small  and  simple 
group,  in  which  the  individuals  are  practically  alike,  grows 
into  a  large  and  complex  group,  in  which  the  individuals  are 
widely  different,  and  their  relations  one  to  another  are  compli- 
cated and  subtle. 

There  are  two  powerful  forces  pressing  upon  human 
beings,  and  compelling  them  to  struggle  and  grow.  The  first 
of  these  forces  is  fear,  the  need  of  protection  against  enemies ; 
the  second  is  hunger,  the  need  of  food  and  the  means  of 
producing  and  storing  food.  The  first  causes  the  individual 
to  combine  with  his  fellows  and  establish  some  form  of  gov- 
ernment, and  this  is  the  origin  of  political  evolution.  The 
second  causes  him  to  accumulate  wealth,  and  to  combine  indus- 
trially, and  this  is  the  origin  of  economic  evolution.  Because 
the  first  force  is  a  little  more  urgent,  we  observe  in  the  his- 
tory of  human  society  that  evolution  in  government  precedes 
evolution  in  industry. 

I  made  this  statement  some  twenty  years  ago,  in  an  article 
in  "Collier's  Weekly."  I  wrote  to  the  effect  that  man's  first  care 
was  to  secure  himself  against  his  enemies,  and  that  when  he 
had  done  this  he  set  out  to  secure  his  food  supply.  "Collier's" 
called  upon  the  late  Professor  Sumner  of  Yale  University,  a 
prize  reactionary  and  Tory  of  the  old  school,  to  answer  me; 
and  Professor  Sumner  made  merry  over  my  statement,  declar- 

122 


The  Book  of  Society  123 

ing  that  man  sought  for  food  long  before  he  was  safe  from 
his  enemies.  Some  years  later,  when  Sumner  died,  one  of  his 
admirers  wrote  in  the  New  York  "Evening  Post"  that  he  had 
completely  overwhelmed  me,  and  I  had  acknowledged  my  de- 
feat by  failing  to  reply — something  which  struck  me  as  very 
funny.  It  was,  of  course,  possible  that  Sumner  had  over- 
whelmed me,  but  to  say  that  I  had  considered  myself  over- 
whelmed was  to  attribute  to  me  a  degree  of  modesty  of  which 
I  was  wholly  incapable.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  I  had  had  my 
usual  experience  with  capitalist  magazines ;  "Collier's  Weekly" 
had  promised  to  publish  my  rejoinder  to  Sumner,  but  failed 
to  keep  the  promise,  and  finally,  when  I  worried  them,  they 
tucked  the  answer  away  in  the  back  part  of  the  paper,  among 
the  advertisements  of  cigars  and  toilet  soaps. 

Professor  Sumner  is  gone,  but  he  has  left  behind  him  an 
army  of  pupils,  and  I  will  protect  myself  againrt  them  by 
phrasing  my  statement  with  extreme  care.  I  do  not  mean  to 
say  that  man  first  secures  himself  completely  against  his  ene- 
mies, and  then  goes  out  to  hunt  for  a  meal.  Of  course  he 
has  to  eat  while  he  is  countering  the  moves  of  his  enemies; 
he  has  to  eat  while  he  is  on  the  march  to  battle,  or  in  flight 
from  it.  But  ask  yourself  this  question:  which  would  you 
choose,  if  you  had  to  choose — to  go  a  couple  of  days  with  noth- 
ing to  eat,  or  to  have  your  throat  cut  by  bandits  and  your 
wife  and  children  carried  away  into  slavery?  Certainly  you 
would  do  your  fighting  first,  and  meantime  you  would  scratch 
together  any  food  you  could.  While  you  were  devoting  your 
energies  to  putting  down  civil  war,  or  to  making  a  treaty 
with  other  tribes,  or  to  preparing  for  a  military  campaign,  you 
would  continue  to  get  food  in  the  way  your  ancestors  had 
got  it;  in  other  words,  your  economic  evolution  would  wait, 
while  your  political  evolution  proceeded.  But  when  you  had 
succeeded  in  putting  down  your  enemies,  and  had  a  long  period 
of  peace  before  you,  then  you  would  plant  some  fields,  and 
domesticate  some  animals,  or  perhaps  discover  some  new  way 
of  weaving  cloth — and  so  your  industrial  life  would  make 
progress. 

It  is  easy  to  see  why  Professor  Sumner  wished  to  con- 
fuse this  issue.  He  could  not  deny  political  evolution,  because 
it  had  happened.  He  despised  and  feared  political  democracy, 
but  it  was  here,  and  he  had  to  speak  politely  to  it,  as  to  a 
tiger  that  had  got  into  his  house.     But  industrial  democracy 


124  Love  and  Society 

was  a  thing  that  had  not  yet  happened  in  the  world;  it  was 
only  a  hope  and  a  prophecy,  and  therefore  a  prize  old  Tory 
was  free  to  ridicule  it.  I  remember  reading  somewhere  his 
statement — ^the  notion  that  democracy  had  anything  to  do  with 
industry,  or  could  in  any  way  be  applied  to  industry,  was  a 
piece  of  silliness.  So,  of  course,  he  sought  to  demolish  my  idea 
that  there  was  a  process  of  evolution  in  economic  affairs,  par- 
alleling the  process  of  political  evolution  which  had  already 
culminated  in  democracy. 

Let  us  consider  the  process  of  political  evolution,  briefly 
and  in  its  broad  outlines.  -  Take  any  savage  tribe ;  you  find  it 
composed  of  individuals  who  are  very  much  alike.  Some  are 
a  little  stronger  than  others,  a  little  more  clever,  more  power- 
ful in  battle;  but  the  difference  is  slight,  and  when  the  tribe 
chooses  someone  to  lead  them,  they  might  as  well  choose 
one  man  as  another.  They  all  have  a  say  in  the  tribe  councils, 
both  men  and  women;  their  "rights"  in  the  tribe  are  the 
same.  They  are,  of  course,  slaves  to  ignorance,  to  degrading 
superstition  and  absurd  taboos ;  but  these  things  apply  to 
everyone  alike,  there  is  no  privileged  caste,  no  hereditary 
inequality. 

But  little  by  little,  as  the  tribe  grows  in  numbers,  and  in 
power  and  intelligence,  as  it  comes  to  capture  slaves  in  battle, 
and  to  unite  with  other  tribes,  there  comes  to  be  an  hereditary 
chieftain  and  a  group  of  his  leading  supporters,  his  courtiers 
and  henchmen.  When  the  society  has  evolved  into  the  stage 
which  we  call  barbarism,  there  is  a  permanent  superior  caste ; 
there  are  hereditary  priests,  who  have  in  their  keeping  the 
favor  of  the  gods ;  and  there  is  a  subject  population  of  slaves. 

The  society  moves  on  into  the  feudal  stage,  in  which  the 
various  grades  and  classes  are  precisely  marked  off,  each  with 
its  different  functions,  its  different  privileges  and  rights  and 
duties.  The  feudal  principalities  and  duchies  war  and  struggle 
among  themselves;  they  are  united  by  marriage  or  by  con- 
quest, and  presently  some  stronger  ruler  brings  a  great  ter- 
ritory under  his  power,  and  we  have  what  is  called  a  king- 
dom; a  society  still  larger,  still  more  complex  in  its  organi- 
zation, and  still  more  rigid  in  its  class  distinctions.  Take 
France,  under  the  ancient  regime,  and  compare  a  courtier  or 
noble  gentleman  with  a  serf ;  they  are  not  only  different 
before  the  law,  they  are  different  in  the  language  they  use, 
in  the  clothes  they  wear,  in  the  ideas  they  hold;  they  are 


The  Book  of  Society  125 

different  even  in  their  bodies,  so  that  the  gentleman  regards 
the  serf  as  an  inferior  species  of  creature. 

The  kings  warred  among  themselves  and  emperors  arose. 
The  ultimate  ideal  in  Europe  was  a  political  society  which 
should  include  the  whole  continent,  and  this  ideal  was  several 
times  almost  attained.  But  it  is  the  rule  of  history  that 
wherever  a  large  society  is  built  upon  the  basis  of  privilege 
and  enslavement,  the  ruling  classes  prove  morally  and  intel- 
lectually unequal  to  the  burden  put  upon  them;  they  become 
corrupted,  and  their  rule  becomes  intolerable.  This  happened 
in  Europe,  and  there  came  political  revolutions — first  in  Eng- 
land, which  accomplished  it  by  gradual  stages,  and  then  in 
the  French  monarchy,  and  quite  recently  in  a  dozen  monarchies 
and  empires,  large  and  small. 

What  precisely  is  this  political  revolution?  Let  us  con- 
sider the  case  of  France,  where  the  change  was  sudden,  and 
the  issues  precisely  drawn.  King  Louis  XIV  had  said,  *T  am 
the  state."  To  a  person  of  our  time  that  might  seem  like  boast- 
ing, but  it  was  merely  an  assertion  of  the  existing  political 
fact.  King  Louis  was  the  state  by  universal  consent,  and  by 
divine  authority,  as  all  men  believed.  The  army  was  his  army, 
the  navy  was  his  navy,  and  wars,  when  he  made  them,  were 
his  wars.  Everyone  in  the  state  was  his  subject,  and  all  the 
property  of  the  state  was  his  personal,  private  property,  to 
dispose  of  as  he  pleased.  The  government  officials  carried 
out  his  will,  and  members  of  the  nobility  held  the  land  and 
ruled  in  his  name. 

But  now  suddenly  the  people  of  France  overthrew  the 
king,  and  put  him  to  death,  and  drove  the  nobles  into  exile; 
they  seized  the  power  of  the  French  state,  and  proclaimed 
themselves  equal  citizens  in  the  state,  with  equal  voices  in  its 
government  and  equal  rights  before  the  law.  So  we  call 
France  a  republic,  and  describe  this  form  of  society  as  polit- 
ical democracy.  It  is  the  completion  of  the  process  of  polit- 
ical evolution,  and  you  will  see  that  it  moves  in  a  sort  of 
spiral ;  having  completed  a  circle  and  got  back  where  it  was 
before,  but  upon  a  higher  plane.  The  citizens  of  a  modern 
republic  are  equal  before  the  law,  just  as  were  the  members 
of  the  savage  tribe;  but  the  political  organization  is  vastly 
larger,  and  infinitely  more  complicated,  and  every  individual 
lives  his  life  upon  a  higher  level,  because  he  shares  in  the 
benefits  of  this  more  highly  organized  and  more  powerful 
state. 


CHAPTER  LIII 

INDUSTRIAL   EVOLUTION 

(Examines  the  process  of  evolution  in  industry  and  the  stage 
which  it  has  so  far  reached.) 

And  now  let  us  consider  the  process  of  industrial  evolu- 
tion. We  shall  find  it  to  be  exactly  the  same  thing,  repro- 
ducing the  changes  in  another  field  of  activity.  You  may 
picture  two  gigantic  waves  sweeping  over  the  ocean.  In  some 
places  the  waves  are  far  apart,  and  in  other  places  they  are 
closer  together;  for  a  time  they  may  mingle,  and  perhaps 
their  bases  always  mingle.  It  would  be  easy  for  a  critic  to 
point  out  how  political  affairs  play  a  leading  part  in  indus- 
trial evolution,  and  vice  versa ;  it  would  be  easy  to  argue  that 
property  rules  the  political  state,  or  again,  that  the  main  func- 
tion of  the  political  state  is  to  protect  property.  As  I  have 
said,  man  has  to  fight  his  enemies,  and  he  has  to  seek  food, 
and  often  he  has  to  do  the  two  things  at  the  same  time;  but 
nevertheless,  broadly  speaking,  we  observe  two  great  waves, 
sweeping  over  human  society,  and  most  of  the  time  these 
waves  are  clearly  separated  and  easily  distinguished. 

Industry  in  a  savage  tribe  is,  like  government,  simple  and 
uniform;  all  the  members  of  the  tribe  get  their  living  in  the 
same  way.  One  may  be  a  little  more  expert  as  a  fisherman, 
another  as  a  gatherer  of  cocoanuts,  but  the  fisherman  gathers 
cocoanuts  and  the  cocoanut-gatherer  fishes.  In  the  days  of 
primitive  communism  there  is  little  economic  strife  and  little 
change;  but  as  slavery  comes  in,  and  the  private  property 
system,  there  begins  industrial  war — the  members  of  the  tribe 
trade  with  one  another,  and  argue  over  prices,  and  gradually 
some  get  the  better  of  others,  they  accumulate  slaves  and  goods, 
and  later  on  they  appropriate  the  land  to  their  private  use. 
Of  course,  the  men  who  do  this  are  often  the  rulers  of  the 
tribe,  and  so  politics  and  industry  are  mixed ;  but  even  assum- 
ing that  the  state  never  interfered,  assuming  that  the  govern- 
ment allowed  business  affairs  to  work  themselves  out  in  their 
own  way,  the  tendency  of  competition  is  always  to  end  in 
monopoly.  The  big  fish  eat  the  little  fish,  the  strong  gain 
advantage  over  the  weak,  the  rich  grow  richer,  and  the  poor 

126 


The  Book  of  Society  127 

grow  relatively  poorer.  As  the  amount  of  trading  increases, 
and  men  specialize  in  the  arts  of  bargaining,  we  see  again  and 
again  how  money  concentrates  in  the  hands  of  a  few.  It  does 
this,  even  when  the  political  state  tries  to  prevent  it;  as,  for 
example,  when  the  princes  and  dukes  of  the  Middle  Ages 
would  torture  the  Jewish  money-lenders  and  take  away  their 
treasure,  but  the  Jews  never  failed  to  grow  rich  again. 

It  is  when  political  evolution  has  completed  itself,  and  a 
republic  has  been  set  up,  that  a  free  field  is  given  to  economic 
forces  to  work  themselves  out  to  their  logical  end.  We  have 
seen  this  in  the  United  States,  where  we  all  started  pretty 
much  on  the  same  economic  level,  and  where  political  tyranny 
has  had  little  hold.  Our  civilization  is  a  civilization  of  the 
trader — the  business  man,  as  we  call  him;  and  we  see  how 
big  business  absorbs  little  business,  and  grows  constantly 
larger  and  more  powerful.  We  are  familiar  with  what  we 
call  "graft,"  the  use  by  business  men  of  the  powers  of  gov- 
ernment to  get  trade  advantage  for  themselves,  and  we  have 
a  school  of  old-time  thinkers,  calling  themselves  "Jeffersonian 
Democrats,"  who  insist  that  if  only  there  had  never  been  any 
government  favors,  economic  equality  and  democracy  would 
have  endured  forever  in  our  country.  But  it  is  my  opinion 
that  government  has  done  far  more  to  prevent  monopoly  and 
special  privilege  in  business  than  to  favor  it;  and  neverthe- 
less, monopoly  has  grown. 

In  other  words,  the  tendency  toward  concentration  in  busi- 
ness, the  absorpytion  of  the  small  business  by  the  big  business, 
is  an  irresistible  natural  process,  which  neither  can  be  nor 
should  be  hindered.  The  condition  of  competition,  whether 
in  politics  or  in  industry,  is  never  a  permanent  one,  and  can 
never  be  made  permanent ;  it  is  a  struggle  which  automatically 
brings  itself  to  an  end.  Large-scale  production  and  distribution 
is  more  economical  than  small-scale,  and  big  business  has  irre- 
sistible advantages  of  credit  and  permanence  over  little  busi- 
ness. As  we  shall  presently  show,  the  blind  and  indiscriminate 
production  of  goods  under  the  competitive  system  leads  to  the 
glutting  of  markets  and  to  industrial  crises.  At  such  times 
the  weaker  concerns  are  weeded  out  and  the  strong  ones  take 
their  trade;  and  as  a  result,  we  have  the  modern  great  cor- 
poration, the  most  powerful  machine  of  production  yet  devised 
by  man,  and  which  corresponds  in  every  aspect  to  the  mon- 
archy in  political  society. 


128  Love  and  Society 

We  are  accustomed  to  speak  of  our  "captains  of  industry," 
our  "coal  kings,"  and  "beef  barons"  and  "lords  of  steel,"  and 
we  think  we  are  using  metaphors ;  but  the  universality  of  these 
metaphors  points  to  a  fundamental  truth  in  them.  As  a  mat- 
ter of  fact,  our  modern  captain  of  industry  fills  in  the  eco- 
nomic world  exactly  the  same  functions  as  were  filled  in 
ancient  days  by  the  head  of  a  feudal  state.  He  has  won  his 
power  in  a  similar  struggle,  and  he  holds  it  by  similar  meth- 
ods. He  rules  over  an  organization  of  human  beings,  arranged, 
economically  speaking,  in  grades  and  classes,  with  their  author- 
ities and  privileges  and  duties  precisely  determined,  as  under 
the  "ancient  regime."  And  just  as  King  Louis  said,  "I  am 
the  state,"  so  Mr.  Armour  considers  that  he  is  Armour  & 
Co.,  and  Mr,  Morgan  considers  that  he  is  the  house  of  Mor- 
gan, and  that  the  business  exists  for  him  and  is  controlled 
by  him  under  divine  authority. 

If  I  am  correct  in  my  analysis  of  the  situation,  this  proc- 
ess of  industrial  evoluton  is  destined  to  complete  itself,  as 
in  the  case  of  the  political  state.  The  subject  populations  of 
industry  are  becoming  more  and  more  discontented  with  their 
servitude,  more  and  more  resentful  of  that  authority  which 
compels  them  to  labor  while  others  reap  the  benefit.  They 
are  organizing  themselves,  and  preparing  for  a  social  trans- 
formation which  will  parallel  in  every  detail  the  revolution 
by  which  our  ancestors  overthrew  the  authority  of  King 
George  III  over  the  American  colonies,  and  made  inhabi- 
tants of  those  colonies  no  longer  subjects  of  a  king,  but  free 
and  equal  citizens  of  a  republic.  I  expect  to  see  a  change 
throughout  the  world,  which  will  take  the  great  instruments 
of  production  which  we  call  corporations  and  trusts,  out  of 
the  hands  of  their  present  private  owners,  and  make  them 
the  property,  either  of  the  entire  community,  or  of  those  who 
do  the  work  in  them.  This  change  is  the  "social  revolution,** 
and  when  it  has  completed  itself,  we  shall  have  in  that  society 
an  Industrial  Republic,  a  form  of  business  management  which 
constitutes  economic  democracy. 

The  history  of  the  world's  political  revolutions  has  been 
written  almost  exclusively  by  aristocratic  or  bourgeois  histo- 
rians; that  is  to  say,  by  men  who,  whatever  their  attitude 
toward  political  democracy,  have  no  conception  of  industrial 
democracy,  and  believe  that  industrial  strife  and  enslavement 
are  the  normal  conditions  of  life.    If,  however,  you  will  read 


'   The  Book  of  Society  129 

Kropotkin's  "Great  French  Revolution,"  you  will  be  inter- 
ested to  discover  how  important  a  part  was  played  in  this 
revolution  by  economic  forces.  Underneath  the  political  dis- 
content of  the  merchants  and  middle  classes  lay  a  vast  mass 
of  social  discontent  of  the  peasants  and  workers.  It  was  the 
masses  of  the  people  who  made  the  revolution,  but  it  was 
the  middle  classes  who  seized  it  and  turned  it  to  their  own 
ends,  putting  down  attempts  toward  economic  equality,  and 
confining  the  changes,  so  far  as  possible,  to  the  political  field. 

And  everywhere  throughout  history,  if  you  study  revolu- 
tions, you  find  that  same  thing  happening.  You  find,  for 
example,  Martin  Luther  fighting  for  the  right  to  preach  the 
word  of  God  without  consulting  the  Pope;  but  when  the 
peasants  of  Germany  rose  and  sought  to  set  themselves  free 
from  feudal  landlords,  Luther  turned  against  them,  and  called 
upon  the  princes  to  shoot  them  down.  "The  ass  needs  to  be 
beaten,  and  the  populace  needs  to  be  controlled  with  a  strong 
hand."  The  landlords  and  propertied  classes  of  England 
were  willing  to  restrict  the  power  of  the  king,  and  to  give 
the  vote  to  the  educated  and  well-to-do;  but  from  the  time 
of  Jack  Cade  to  our  own  they  shoot  down  the  poor. 

But  meantime,  the  industrial  process  continues;  the  mod- 
ern factory  system  brings  the  workers  together  in  larger  and 
larger  groups,  and  teaches  them  the  lesson  of  class  conscious- 
ness. So  the  time  of  the  workers  draws  near.  The  first 
attempt  in  modern  times  to  accomplish  the  social  revolution 
and  set  up  industrial  democracy  was  in  the  Paris  Commune. 
When  the  French  empire  collapsed,  after  the  war  with  Ger- 
many in  1871,  the  workers  of  Paris  seized  control.  They 
were  massacred,  some  50,000  of  them,  and  the  propertied 
classes  of  France  established  the  present  bourgeois  republic, 
which  has  now  become  the  bulwark  of  reaction  throughout 
the  Continent  of  Europe. 

Next  came  the  Russian  revolution  of  1905,  and  this  was 
an  interesting  illustration  of  the  relation  between  the  two 
waves  of  social  progress.  Russia  was  a  backward  country 
industrially,  and  according  to  theory  not  at  all  prepared  for 
the  social  revolution.  But  nowadays  the  thoughts  of  men  cir- 
culate all  over  the  world,  and  the  exiles  from  Russia  had 
absorbed  Marxian  ideas,  and  were  not  prepared  to  accept  a 
purely  political  freedom.  So  in  1905,  after  the  Japanese  war, 
when  the  people  rose  and  forced  the  Czar  to  grant  a  par- 


130  Love  and  Society 

liament,  the  extremists  made  an  effort  to  accomplish  the  social 
revolution  at  the  same  time.  The  peasants  began  to  demand 
the  land,  and  the  workers  the  factories ;  whereupon  the  capital- 
ists and  middle  classes,  who  wanted  a  parliament,  but  did  not 
want  Socialism,  went  over  to  the  side  of  reaction,  and  both 
the  political  and  social  revolutions  were  crushed. 

But  then  came  the  great  war,  for  which  Russia  with  her 
incompetent  government  and  her  undeveloped  industry  was 
unprepared.  The  strain  of  it  broke  her  down  long  before 
the  other  Allies,  and  in  the  universal  suffering  and  ruin  the 
Russian  people  were  again  forced  to  rise.  The  political  revo- 
lution was  accomplished,  the  Czar  was  imprisoned,  and  the 
Douma  reigned  supreme.  Middle  class  liberalism  throughout 
the  world  gave  its  blessings  to  this  revolution,  and  hastened 
to  welcome  a  new  political  democracy  to  the  society  of  nations. 
But  then  occurred  what  to  orthodox  democratic  opinion  has 
been  the  most  terrifying  spectacle  in  human  history.  The 
Russian  people  had  been  driven  too  far  towards  starvation 
and  despair;  the  masses  had  been  too  embittered,  and  they 
rose  again,  overthrowing  not  only  their  Czar  and  their  grand 
dukes,  but  their  capitalists  and  land-owners.  For  the  first 
time  in  history  the  social  revolution  established  itself,  and  the 
workers  were  in  control  of  a  great  state.  Ever  since  then 
we  have  seen  exactly  what  we  saw  in  Europe  from  1789  on- 
ward, when  the  first  political  republic  was  established,  and 
all  the  monarchies  and  empires  of  the  world  banded  them- 
selves together  to  stamp  it  out.  We  have  witnessed  a  cam- 
paign of  war,  blockade,  intrigue  and  propaganda  against  the 
Soviet  government  of  Russia,  all  pretending  to  be  carried 
on  in  the  name  of  the  Russian  people,  and  for  the  purpose 
of  saving  them  from  suffering — but  all  obviously  based  upon 
one  consideration  and  one  alone,  the  fear  that  an  effort  at 
industrial  self-government  might  possibly  prove  to  be  a 
success. 

Whether  or  not  the  Soviets  will  prove  permanent,  no  one 
can  say.  But  this  much  is  certain ;  just  as  the  French  revolu- 
tion sent  a  thrill  around  the  world,  and  planted  in  the  hearts 
of  the  common  people  the  wonderful  dream  of  freedom  from 
kings  and  ruling  classes,  just  so  the  Russian  revolution  has 
brought  to  the  working  masses  the  dream  of  freedom  from 
masters  and  landlords.  Everywhere  in  capitalist  society  this 
ferment  is  working,  and  in  one  country  after  another  we 


The  Book  of  Society  151 

see  the  first  pangs  of  the  new  birth.  Also  we  see  capitalists 
and  landlords,  who  once  found  "democracy,"  "free  speech" 
and  "equality  before  the  law"  useful  formulas  to  break  down 
the  power  of  kings  and  aristocrats,  now  repudiating  their 
old-time  beliefs,  and  going  back  to  the  frankest  reaction.  We 
see,  in  our  own  "land  of  the  free,"  the  government  refus- 
ing to  reprint  the  Declaration  of  Independence  during  the 
war,  and  arresting  men  for  quoting  from  it  and  circulating 
it;  we  even  see  the  Department  of  Justice  refusing  to  allow 
people  to  reprint  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount! 


CHAPTER  LIV 
THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE 

(Discusses  history  as  a  battle-ground  between  ruling  and  sub- 
ject classes,  and  the  method  and  outcome  of  this  struggle.) 

There  is  a  theory  of  social  development,  sometimes  called 
the  materialistic  interpretation  of  history,  and  sometimes  the 
economic  interpretation  of  history.  It  is  one  of  the  contri- 
butions to  our  thought  which  we  owe  to  Karl  Marx,  and  like 
all  the  rest  of  Marxian  theory,  it  is  a  subject  of  embittered 
controversy,  not  merely  between  Socialists  and  orthodox 
economists,  but  between  various  schools  of  revolutionary  doc- 
trine. For  my  part,  I  have  never  been  a  great  hand  for 
doctrine,  whether  ancient  or  modern;  I  am  not  much  more 
concerned  with  what  Marx  taught  than  I  am  with  what  St. 
Paul  taught,  or  what  Martin  Luther  taught.  My  advice  is 
to  look  at  life  with  your  own  eyes,  and  to  state  in  simple 
language  the  conclusions  of  your  own  thinking. 

Man  is  an  eating  animal;  he  has  also  been  described  as  a 
tool-making  animal,  and  might  be  described  as  an  ideal-mak- 
ing animal.  There  is  a  tendency  on  the  part  of  those  who 
specialize  in  the  making  of  ideals  to  repudiate  the  eating  and 
the  tool-making  sides  of  man;  which  accounts  for  the 
quarrel  between  the  Marxians  and  the  moralists-  All  through 
history  you  find  new  efforts  of  man  to  develop  his  emotional 
and  spiritual  nature,  and  to  escape  from  the  humiliating  limita- 
tions of  the  flesh.  These  efforts  have  many  of  them  been 
animated  by  desperate  sincerity,  but  none  of  them  have 
changed  the  fundamental  fact  that  man  is  an  eating  animal, 
an  animal  insufficiently  provided  by  nature  against  cold,  and 
with  an  intense  repugnance  to  having  streams  of  cold  water 
run  down  back  of  his  neck.  The  religious  teachers  go  out 
with  empty  purse,  and  "take  no  thought  for  the  morrow"; 
but  the  forces  of  nature  press  insistently  upon  them,  and  little 
by  little  they  make  compromises,  they  take  to  shelter  while 
they  are  preaching,  they  consent  to  live  in  houses,  and  even 
to  own  houses,  and  to  keep  a  bank  account.  So  they  make 
terms  with  the  powers   of   this   world,  and  the  powers  of 

132 


The  Book  of  Society  133 

this  world,  which  are  subtle,  and  awake  to  their  own  inter- 
ests, find  ways  to  twist  the  new  doctrine  to  their  ends. 

So  the  new  rehgion  becomes  simply  another  form  of  the 
old  hypocrisy;  and  it  comes  to  us  as  a  breath  of  fresh  air 
in  a  room  full  of  corruption  when  some  one  says,  "Let  us 
have  done  with  aged  shams  and  false  idealisms.  Let  us  face 
the  facts  of  life,  and  admit  that  man  is  a  physical  animal, 
and  cannot  do  any  sane  and  constructive  thinking  until  he  has 
food  and  shelter  provided.  Let  us  look  at  history  with  un- 
blinking eyes,  and  realize  that  food  and  shelter,  the  material 
means  of  life,  are  what  men  have  been  seeking  all  through 
history,  and  will  continue  to  seek,  until  we  put  production  and 
distribution  upon  a  basis  of  justice,  instead  of  a  basis  of  force." 

Such  is,  as  simply  as  I  can  phrase  it,  the  materialistic 
interpretation  of  history.  Put  into  its  dress  of  scientific  lan- 
guage it  reads:  the  dominant  method  of  production  and 
exchange  in  any  society  determines  the  institutions  and  forms 
of  that  society.  I  do  not  think  I  exaggerate  in  saying  that 
this  formula,  applied  with  judgment  and  discrimination,  is  a 
key  to  the  understanding  of  human  societies. 

Wherever  man  has  moved  into  the  stage  of  slavery  and 
private  property  there  has  been  some  group  which  has  held 
power  and  sought  to  maintain  and  increase  it.  This  group 
has  set  the  standards  of  behavior  and  belief  for  the  commu- 
nity, and  if  you  wish  to  understand  the  government  and  reli- 
gion, the  manners  and  morals,  the  philosophy  and  literature 
and  art  of  that  community,  the  first  thing  you  have  to  do  is 
to  understand  the  dominant  group  and  its  methods  of  keep- 
ing itself  on  top.  This  statement  applies,  not  merely  to  those 
cultural  forms  which  are  established  and  ordained  by  the 
ruling  class;  it  applies  equally  well  to  the  revolutionary 
forms,  the  behavior  and  beliefs  of  those  who  oppose  the  rul- 
ing class.  For  men  do  not  revolt  in  a  vacuum,  they  revolt 
against  certain  conditions,  and  the  form  of  their  revolt  is 
determined  by  the  conditions.  Take,  for  example,  primitive 
Christianity,  which  was  certainly  an  effort  to  be  unworldly, 
if  ever  such  an  effort  was  made  by  man.  But  you  cannot 
imderstand  anything  about  primitive  Christianity  unless  you 
see  it  as  a  new  form  of  slave  revolt  against  Roman  imperial- 
ism and  capitalism. 

The  theory  of  the  class  struggle  is  the  master  key  to  the 
bewilderments  and  confusions  of  history.    Always  there  is  a 


134  LoTE  AND  Society 

dominant  class,  holding  the  power  of  the  state,  and  always 
there  are  subject  classes;  and  sooner  or  later  the  subject 
classes  begin  protesting  and  struggling  for  wider  rights.  When 
they  think  they  are  strong  enough,  they  attempt  a  revolt,  and 
sometimes  they  succeed.  If  they  do,  they  write  the  histories 
of  the  revolt,  and  their  leaders  become  heroes  and  statesmen. 
If  they  fail,  the  histories  are  written  by  their  oppressors, 
and  the  rebels  are  portrayed  as  criminals. 

One  of  the  commonest  of  popular  assumptions  is  that  if 
the  rebels  have  justice  on  their  side,  they  are  bound  to  succeed 
in  the  long  run;  but  this  is  merely  the  sentimental  nonsense 
that  is  made  out  of  history.  It  is  perfectly  possible  for  a 
just  revolt  to  be  crushed,  and  to  be  crushed  again  and  again ; 
just  as  it  is  possible  for  a  child  which  is  ready  to  be  born  to  fail 
to  be  born,  and  to  perish  miserably.  The  fact  that  the  Huguenots 
had  most  of  the  virtue  and  industry  and  intelligence  of  France 
did  not  keep  them  from  being  slaughtered  by  Catholic  bigots, 
aftd  reaction  riveted  upon  the  French  people  for  a  couple  of 
hundred  years.  The  fact  that  the  Moors  had  most  of  the  indus- 
try of  Spain  did  not  keep  them  from  being  driven  into 
exile  by  the  Inquisition,  and  the  intellectual  life  of  the  Spanish 
people  strangled  for  three  hundred  or  four  hundred  years. 

Some  eight  hundred  years  ago  our  ancestors  in  England 
brought  a  cruel  and  despotic  king  to  battle,  and  conquered 
him,  and  on  the  field  of  Runnymede  forced  him  to  sign  a  grant 
of  rights  to  Englishmen.  That  document  is  known  as  Magna 
Carta,  or  the  Great  Charter,  and  everyone  who  writes  political 
history  today  recognizes  it  as  one  of  the  greatest  of  man's 
achievements,  the  beginning  of  a  process  which  we  hope  will 
bring  freedom  and  equality  before  the  law  to  every  human 
being  on  earth. 

And  now  we  have  come  to  the  stage  in  our  industrial  af- 
fairs, when  the  organized  workers  seek  to  bring  the  monarchs 
of  industry  into  the  council  chamber,  and  force  them  to  sign 
a  similar  Great  Charter,  which  will  grant  freedom  and  self- 
government  to  the  workers.  Just  as  King  John  was  forced 
to  admit  that  the  power  to  tax  and  spend  the  public  revenue 
belonged  to  the  people  of  England,  and  not  to  the  ruler; 
just  so  the  workers  will  establish  the  principle  that  the  finances 
of  industry  are  a  public  concern,  that  the  books  are 
to  be  opened,  and  prices  fixed  and  wages  paid  by  the  demo- 
cratic vote  of  the  citizens  of  industry.     If  that  change  is 


The  Book  of  Society  135 

accomplished,  the  historian  of  the  future  will  recognize  it 
as  another  momentous  step  in  progress;  and  he  wUl  heed 
the  protests  of  the  lords  of  industry,  that  they  are  being 
deprived  of  their  freedom  to  do  business,  and  of  their  sacred 
legal  rights  to  their  profits,  as  little  as  he  heeded  the  protests 
of  King  John  against  the  "treason"  and  "usurpation"  and 
infringement  of  "divine  right"  by  the  rebellious  barons. 


CHAPTER  LV 

THE  CAPITALIST  SYSTEM 

(Shows  how  wealth  is  produced  in  modern  society,  and  the 
effect  of  this  system  upon  the  minds  of  the  workers.) 

In  the  beginning  man  got  his  living  by  hunting  and  fish- 
ing. Then  he  took  to  keeping  flocks  and  herds,  and  later  by 
slow  stages  he  settled  down  to  agriculture.  With  the  intro- 
duction of  slavery  and  the  ownership  of  the  land  by  ruling 
classes,  there  came  to  be  a  subject  class  of  workers,  who 
toiled  on  the  land  from  dawn  to  dark,  year  in  and  year  out, 
and  got,  if  they  were  fortunate,  an  existence  for  themselves 
and  their  families.  Whether  these  workers  were  called  slaves 
or  serfs  or  peasants,  whether  their  product  was  taken  from 
them  in  the  form  of  taxes  by  the  king,  or  of  rent  by  the  land- 
lord, made  no  difference ;  the  workers  were  bound  to  the  soil, 
like  the  beasts  with  which  they  lived  in  intimate  contact.  They 
were  drafted  into  armies,  and  made  to  fight  for  their  lords 
•and  masters ;  they  suffered  pestilence  and  famine,  lire  and 
slaughter;  but  with  infinite  patience  they  would  rebuild  their 
huts,  and  dig  and  plant  again,  whether  for  the  old  master  or 
for  a  new  one. 

In  the  early  days  these  workers  made  their  own  crude  tools 
and  weapons;  but  very  early  there  must  have  been  some  who 
specialized  in  such  arts,  and  with  the  growth  of  towns  and 
communications  came  a  new  kind  of  labor,  based  upon  a  new 
system.  Some  enterprising  man  would  buy  slaves,  or  hire 
labor,  and  obtain  a  supply  of  raw  material,  and  manufacture 
goods  to  be  bartered  or  sold.  He  would  pay  his  workers 
enough  to  draw  them  from  the  land,  and  would  sell  the  prod- 
uct for  what  he  could  get,  and  the  difference  would  be  his 
profit.  That  was  capitalism,  and  at  first  it  was  a  thing  of 
no  importance,  and  the  men  who  engaged  in  it  had  no  social 
standing.  But  princes  and  lords  needed  weapons  and  supplies 
for  their  armies,  and  the  men  who  could  furnish  these  things 
became  more  and  more  necessary,  and  the  states  which  en- 
couraged them  were  the  ones  which  rose  to  power.  Mer- 
chants and  sea-traders  became  the  intimates  of  kings,  and  by 

136 


The  Book  of  Society  137 

the  time  of  the  Roman  empire,  capitalism  was  a  great  world 
power,  dominating  the  state,  using  the  armies  of  the  state  for 
its  purposes.  It  went  down  with  the  rest  of  Roman  civili- 
zation, but  in  the  Middle  Ages  it  began  once  more  to  revive, 
and  by  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century  the  merchants  and 
money  lenders  of  France,  with  their  retainers,  the  lawyers  and 
journalists,  were  powerful  enough  to  .take  the  control  of 
society. 

Then,  in  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century,  came  the 
invention  of  machinery  and  of  the  power  process.  Capitalism 
began  to  grow  like  a  young  giant  among  pygmies.  In  the 
course  of  a  century  it  has  ousted  all  other  methods  of  pro- 
duction, and  all  other  forms  of  social  activity.  A  hundred 
years  ago  the  British  House  of  Commons  was  a  parliament 
of  landlords;  today  it  is  a  Merchants'  and  Manufacturers' 
Association.  Out  of  the  707  members  of  the  British  House 
of  Commons,  361  are  members  of  the  "Federation  of  British 
Industries,"  the  labor-smashing  organization  of  British  "big 
business."  And  the  same  is  true  of  every  other  parliament 
and  congress  in  the  modern  capitalist  state.  Practically  all 
the  wealth  of  the  world  today  is  produced  by  the  capitalist 
method,  and  distributed  under  capitalist  supervision,  and  there- 
fore capitalist  ideas  prevail  in  our  society,  to  the  practical 
exclusion  of  all  other  ideas.  I  have  shown  in  "The  Profits 
of  Religion"  how  these  ideas  dominate  the  modern  church, 
and  in  "The  Brass  Check"  how  they  dominate  the  modern 
press.  I  plan  to  write  two  books,  to  show  how  they  dominate 
education  and  literature. 

A  hundred  years  ago  an  industry  consisted  of  a  half  a 
dozen  or  a  dozen  men,  working  under  the  personal  super- 
vision of  an  owner,  and  using  crude  hand  tools.  Today  it 
consists  of  a  gigantic  trust,  owning  and  managing  scores  and 
perhaps  hundreds  of  mills  and  factories,  each  employing  thou- 
sands of  workers.  A  corporation  like  the  Steel  Trust  owns 
enough  of  the  sources  of  its  raw  material  to  give  it  prac- 
tical monopoly;  it  owns  a  fleet  of  vessels  especially  designed 
for  ore-carrying;  it  owns  its  private  railroads,  to  deliver  the 
ore  to  the  mills.  Through  its  system  of  dummy  directorates 
it  has  practical  control  of  the  main  railroads  over  which  it 
distributes  its  products;  also  of  banks  and  trust  companies 
and  insurance  companies,  to  gather  the  money  of  the  public 
to  finance  its  undertakings.     It  owns  huge  office  buildings. 


138  Love  and  Society 

and  vast  tracts  of  land  upon  which  the  homes  of  its  workers 
are  built.  It  has  a  private  army  for  the  defense  of  its  prop- 
erty— a  complete  army  of  cavalry,  infantry  and  artillery,  in- 
cluding a  large  and  highly  efficient  secret  service  department, 
with  a  host  of  informers  and  spies.  It  has  newspapers  for 
the  purpose  of  propaganda,  and  it  controls  the  government 
of  every  village,  town  and  city  in  which  it  has  important 
interests.  If  you  will  take  the  trouble  to  visit  a  "steel  town," 
and  make  inquiries  among  public  officials,  newspaper  men, 
and  others  who  are  "on  the  inside,"  you  will  discover  that  those 
in  authority  consider  it  necessary  and  proper  that  "steel" 
should  control,  and  are  unable  to  conceive  any  other  condition 
of  affairs.  If  you  go  to  other  parts  of  the  country,  where 
other  great  industries  are  located,  you  find  it  taken  for  granted 
that  "copper"  should  control,  or  "lumber,"  or  "coal,"  or  "oil," 
or  whatever  it  may  be. 

Under  the  system  of  large  scale  capitalism,  labor  is  a  com- 
modity, bought  and  sold  in  the  market  like  any  other  com- 
modity. Some  years  ago  Congress  was  requested  to  pass  a 
law  contradicting  this  fundamental  fact  of  world  capitalism. 
Congress  passed  a  law,  very  carefully  worded  so  that  no  one 
could  be  sure  what  it  meant,  and  a  few  year^  later  the  Su- 
preme Court  nullified  the  law.  But  all  through  this  political 
and  legal  controversy  the  status  of  labor  remained  exactly  the 
same;  there  was  a  "labor  market,"  consisting  of  those  mem- 
bers of  the  community  who,  in  the  formula  of  Marx,  had 
nothing  but  their  labor  power  to  sell.  These  competed  for 
recognition  at  the  factory  gates,  and  highly  skilled  foremen 
selected  those  who  ofiFered  the  largest  quantity  of  labor  power 
for  the  stated  wage. 

So  entirely  impersonal  is  this  process  that  there  are  great 
industries  in  America  in  which  ninety  per  cent  of  the  common 
labor  force  is  hired  and  fired  all  over  again  in  the  course  of 
a  year.  These  men  are  put  to  work  in  gangs,  under  a  system 
which  enables  one  picked  man  to  set  the  pace,  and  compel 
all  the  others  to  keep  up  with  him,  under  penalty  of  being 
discharged.  This  process  is  known  as  "speeding  up,"  and  its 
purpose  is  to  obtam  from  each  worker  the  greatest  quantity 
of  energy  in  exchange  for  his  daily  wage.  In  the  steel  indus- 
try men  work  twelve  hours  a  day  for  six  days  in  the  week, 
and  then  finish  with  a  twenty-four-hour  day.  If  they  do  not 
work  so  long  in  other  industries,  it  is  because  experience  has 


The  Book  of  Society  139 

proven  that  the  greatest  quantity  of  energy  can  be  obtained 
from  them  in  a  shorter  time.  There  are  very  few  men  who 
can  stand  this  pace  for  long.  Those  who  are  not  crippled  or 
killed  in  accidents  are  broken  down  at  forty,  and  all  the  great 
corporations  recognize  this  fact.  Their  foremen  pick  out  the 
younger  men,  and  practically  all  concerns  have  an  age  rule, 
and  never  hire  men  above  forty  or  forty-five. 

I  shall  not  in  this  book  go  into  details  concerning  the  fate 
of  the  worker  under  the  profit  system.  I  have  written  two 
novels,  "The  Jungle"  and  "King  Coal,"  in  which  the  facts  are 
portrayed  in  detail,  and  it  seems  the  part  of  common  sense  to 
refer  the  reader  to  these  text-books.  It  will  suffice  here  to 
set  forth  the  main  outlines  of  the  situation.  In  every  capitalist 
country  of  the  world  the  masses  of  the  people  are  herded 
into  industries,  in  whose  profits  they  have  no  share,  and  in 
whose  welfare  they  have  no  interest.  They  do  not  know  the 
people  for  whom  they  work ;  they  have  no  himian  relationship, 
either  with  their  work  or  with  their  employers.  They  see  the 
surplus  of  their  product  drawn  off  to  maintain  a  class  of 
idlers,  whose  activities  they  know  only  through  the  scandals 
of  the  divorce  courts  and  the  luxury-love  of  the  moving  pic- 
ture screen.  They  compete  with  one  another  for  jobs,  and 
bid  down  one  another's  wages ;  and  if  they  attempt  to  organize 
and  end  this  competition,  their  efforts  are  broken  by  newspaper 
propaganda  and  policemen's  clubs.  At  the  same  time  they 
know  that  monopoly,  open  or  secret,  prevails  in  the  fixing  of 
prices,  and  so  they  find  the  struggle  to  "get  ahead"  a  losing 
one.  In  America  it  used  to  be  possible  for  the  young  and 
energetic  to  "go  West";  but  now  the  wave  of  capitalism  has 
reached  the  Pacific  coast  and  been  thrown  back,  and  there 
is  no  more  frontier. 

The  man  who  works  on  the  land  has  been  through  all  the 
ages  a  solitary  man.  He  is  better  friends  with  his  horse  and 
his  cow  than  with  his  fellow  humans.  He  is  brutalized  by 
incessant  toil,  he  lives  amid  dirt  and  the  filth  of  animals, 
he  is,  in  the  words  of  Edwin  Markham : 

''A  thing  that  grieves  not  and  that  never  hopes. 
Stunted  and  stunned,  a  brother  to  the  ox," 

He  is  a  victim  of  natural  forces  which  he  does  not  under- 
stand, and  inevitably  therefore  he  is  superstitious.  Being  alone. 


140  Love  and  Society 

he  is  helpless  against  his  masters,  and  only  utter  despera- 
tion drives  him  to  revolt. 

But  consider  the  capitalist  system — how  different  the  con- 
ditions of  its  workers !  Here  they  are  gathered  into  city 
slums,  and  their  wits  are  sharpened  by  continual  contact  with 
their  fellows.  The  printing  press  makes  cheap  the  spread 
of  information,  and  the  soap-box  makes  it  even  cheaper.  Any 
man  with  a  grievance  can  shout  aloud,  and  be  sure  of  an 
audience  to  listen,  and  he  can  get  a  great  deal  said  before 
the  company  watchman  or  the  policeman  can  throttle  him. 
Moreover,  the  modern  worker  is  not  struggling  with  drought 
and  tempest  and  hail;  he  does  not  see  his  labors  wiped  out 
by  volcanic  eruption  or  lightning  stroke ;  he  is  dealing  with 
machinery,  something  that  he  himself  has  made,  and  that 
he  fully  understands.  If  a  machine  gets  out  of  order,  he 
does  not  fall  down  upon  his  knees  and  pray  to  God  to  fix 
it.  All  the  training  of  his  life  teaches  him  the  relationship 
of  cause  and  effect,  the  adjustment  of  means  to  ends.  So 
the  modern  worker,  as  a  necessary  consequence  of  his  daily 
work,  is  practical,  skeptical,  and  unsentimental  in  his  psy- 
chology. And  what  is  more,  he  is  making  all  the  rest  of 
society  of  the  same  temperament.  He  is  building  roads  out 
into  the  country,  and  building  machines  to  roll  over  them; 
he  is  running  telephone  lines  and  sending  newspapers  and 
magazines  and  moving  picture  shows  to  the  peasant  and  the 
farmer;  so  the  young  peasants  and  farmers  hunger  for  the 
city,  and  they  learn  to  fix  machinery  instead  of  praying  to 
God. 

Such  is  the  psychology  of  the  modem  working  class ;  and 
the  supreme  achievement  of  their  sharpened  wits  is  an  un- 
derstanding of  the  capitalist  process.  As  a  matter  of  fact 
they  did  not  make  this  discovery  for  themselves ;  it  was  made 
for  them  by  middle-class  men,  lawyers  and  teachers  and 
writers — Fourier,  Owen,  Marx,  Lassalle.  The  modern  doc- 
trine is  called  by  various  names:  Socialism,  Communism, 
Anarchism,  Bolshevism,  Syndicalism,  Collectivism.  Later  on 
I  shall  define  these  various  terms,  and  point  out  the  distinc- 
tions between  them.  For  the  moment  I  emphasize  the  fac- 
tor they  all  have  in  common,  and  which  is  fundamental :  they 
wish  to  break  the  power  of  class  ownership  and  control  of 
the  instruments  and  means  of  production;  they  wish  to 
replace  private  capitalism  by  some  system  under  which  the 


The  Book  of  Society  141 

instruments  and  means  of  production  are  collectively  owned 
and  operated;  and  they  look  to  the  non-owning  class,  the 
proletarian,  as  the  motive  power  by  which  this  change  is  to 
be  compelled.  I  shall  in  future  refer  to  this  as  the  "social 
revolutionary"  doctrine ;  taking  pains  to  explain  that  the  word 
"revolutionary"  is  to  be  divested  of  its  popular  meaning  of 
physical  violence.  It  is  perfectly  conceivable  that  the  change 
may  be  brought  about  peaceably,  and  I  shall  try  to  show 
before  long  that  in  modern  capitalist  states  the  decision  as 
to  whether  it  is  brought  about  peaceably  or  by  violence  rests 
with  the  present  masters  of  industry. 


CHAPTER  LVI 

THE  CAPITALIST  PROCESS 

(How  profits  are  made  under  the  present  industrial  system 
and  what  becomes  of  them.) 

We  have  next  to  examine  the  structure  of  the  capitalist 
order,  basing  our  argument  on  facts  which  are  admitted  by 
everyone,  including  the  most  ardent  defenders  of  the  present 
system. 

All  men  have  to  have  certain  material  things  which  we 
describe  as  goods.  As  these  goods  do  not  produce  them- 
selves, it  is  necessary  that  some  should  work.  The  workers 
must  have  tools;  also  they  must  have  access  to  the  land  and 
the  sources  of  raw  materials.  These  means  of  production 
are  owned  by  some  individuals  in  the  community,  and  this 
ownership  gives  them  power  to  direct  the  work  of  the  rest. 
Those  who  own  the  land  and  the  natural  sources  of  wealth 
we  call  capitalists,  or  business  men,  and  those  who  do  not 
own  these  things,  or  whose  share  in  them  is  insignificant, 
are  the  proletariat,  or  working  class. 

If  you  state  to  the  average  American  that  there  is  a 
capitalist  class  and  a  proletariat  in  this  country,  he  will  point 
out  that  many  who  are  now  members  of  the  capitalist  class 
were  originally  members  of  the  proletariat ;  they  have  worked 
hard  and  saved,  and  accumulated  property.  But  this  is  mere- 
ly confusing  the  issue.  The  fact  that  some  proletarians  turn 
into  capitalists  and  some  capitalists  into  proletarians  is  im- 
portant to  the  individuals  concerned,  but  it  does  not  alter 
the  fact  that  there  are  two  classes,  capitalist  and  prole- 
tarian. Consider,  by  way  of  illustrating,  a  field  with  trees 
growing  on  it;  we  have  earth,  and  we  have  trees,  and  the 
distinction  between  them  is  unmistakable.  The  roots  of  the 
trees  go  down  into  the  earth,  and  take  up  portions  of  the 
earth  and  turn  it  into  tree.  The  leaves  and  the  dead  branches 
fall,  and  in  the  course  of  time  are  turned  once  more  to 
earth.  There  are  all  sorts  of  stages  between  earth  and  tree, 
and  between  tree  and  earth ;  but  you  would  not  therefore  say 
that  the  word  "earth"  and  the  word  "tree"  are  misnomers. 

142 


The  Book  of  Society  143? 

The  working  men  go  to  the  business  man  and  apply  for 
work.  The  business  man  gives  them  work,  and  takes  their 
product,  and  offers  it  in  the  market  at  a  price  which  allows 
him  a  profit  above  cost.  If  he  can  sell  at  a  profit,  he  repeats, 
the  process,  and  the  worker  has  a  job.  If  he  cannot  sell 
at  a  profit,  the  worker  is  out  of  a  job.  Here  and  there  may 
be  a  benevolent  business  man  who,  rather  than  turn  his  work- 
ers out  of  a  job,  will  sell  his  goods  at  cost,  or  even  for  a 
short  time  at  a  loss ;  but  if  he  keeps  the  factory  going  simply 
for  the  benefit  of  his  workers,  and  with  no  expectation  of 
ever  making  a  profit,  that  is  a  form  of  charity,  and  not  the 
common  system  under  which  our  business  is  now  carried  on. 

So  it  appears  that  the  worker  is  dependent  for  his  wages, 
upon  the  ability  of  the  business  man  to  make  a  profit.  The 
worker's  life  is  inextricably  bound  up  with  the  profit  of  the 
capitalist — no  profit  for  the  capitalist,  no  life  for  the  worker. 
The  capitalist,  going  out  to  look  for  markets  for  his  goods^ 
is  seeking,  not  merely  profit  for  himself,  but  life  for  his 
workers. 

Now,  the  business  man  pays  a  certain  percentage  of  his. 
total  receipts  for  labor,  another  percentage  for  raw  m'ate- 
rials,  another  percentage  for  his  overhead  charges,  and  the. 
rest  is  profit  in  various  forms,  rent  to  the  landlord,  interest 
to  the  bondholder,  dividends  to  the  stockholder.  All  this 
total  sum  goes  to  human  individuals,  and  each  has  thus  a, 
certain  amount  of  money  to  spend.  They  pay  it  over  to 
other  individuals  for  goods  or  services,  and  so  the  money 
keeps  circulating,  and  business  keeps  going.  That  is  as  deep 
as  the  average  mind  probes  into  the  process. 

But  let  us  probe  a  little  deeper.  It  is  evident  that,  in  the 
course  of  all  this  exchanging  of  goods,  some  individuals  get 
a  larger  share  than  other  individuals.  Our  government  col- 
lects an  income  tax,  and  thus  we  have  statistics  representing- 
what  people  are  willing  to  admit  about  the  share  they  get. 
In  1917  it  appeared  that,  speaking  roughly,  one  family  out 
of  six  had  an  income  of  over  $1,000  a  year,  and  one  family 
out  of  twelve  had  an  income  of  over  $2,000.  But  there  were 
19,000  families  which  admitted  incomes  of  over  $50,000  a. 
year,  and  300  with  over  $1,000,000  a  year. 

Now  the  families  that  get  less  than  a  thousand  dollars  a 
year  obviously  have  to  spend  the  greater  part  of  their  income. 
upon  their  immediate  living  expenscc.    But  the  families  that. 


144  Lo^TE  AND  Society 

get  $50,000  a  year  do  not  need  to  spend  everything,  and  most 
of  them  take  the  greater  part  of  their  income  and  reinvest 
it — that  is,  they  spend  it  upon  the  creating  of  new  machinery 
of  production,  railroads,  mills,  factories,  office  buildings,  the 
whole  elaborate  structure  of  capitalist  industry. 

Exactly  what  proportion  of  the  total  product  of  industry 
is  thus  taken  and  reinvested  no  one  can  say;  but  this  we 
know,  our  cities  are  growing  at  an  enormous  rate,  our  manu- 
facturing power  is  increasing  by  leaps  and  bounds,  we  are 
perfecting  processes  which  enable  one  man  to  do  the  work 
of  a  hundred  men,  which  increase  the  product  of  one  man's 
labor  a  hundredfold.  All  this  goes  on  bhndly,  automatically; 
a  Niagara  of  goods  of  all  sorts  is  poured  out,  and  we  call  it 
^'prosperity." 

But  then  suddenly  a  strange  and  bewildering  thing  hap- 
pens. All  at  once,  and  without  warning,  orders  fall  off, 
values  begin  to  drop,  business  collapses,  factories  are  shut 
down,  and  millions  of  men  are  thrown  out  of  jobs.  Mer- 
chants look  at  one  another  with  blanched  faces ;  each  one  has 
been  counting  on  paying  his  bills  with  the  profits  he  was 
going  to  make,  and  now  his  profits  are  gone,  and  he  can't 
pay.  The  newspapers  and  magazines  keep  insisting  that  it 
can't  be  true,  that  business  is  going  to  revive  next  week,  that 
prosperity  is  just  ahead.  But  the  factories  stay  shut,  and 
the  millions  of  men  stay  idle. 

This  is  th^  condition  in  which  we  find  ourselves  as  I  write 
this  book,  ft  has  been  happening  regularly  in  our  history 
every  ten  years  or  so,  ever  since  America  started;  we  have 
had  a  hundred  years  to  reflect  upon  it  and  to  probe  into  the 
causes  of  it,  and  such  is  business  intelligence  in  the  most 
enlightened  country  in  the  world,  you  may  search  the  pages 
of  our  newspapers  from  the  first  column  of  millionaire 
divorce  suits  to  the  last  column  of  "situations  wanted,"  and 
-nowhere  can  you  find  one  word  to  explain  this  mysterious 
calamity  of  "hard  times" — how  it  comes  to  happen  to  our  social 
system,  or  what  could  be  done  to  prevent  it!  To  supply  this 
deficiency  in  present  day  thinking  is  our  next  task. 


CHAPTER  LVII 

HARD  TIMES 

(Explains  why  capitalist  prosperity  is  a  spasmodic  thing,  and 
why  abundant  production  brings  distress  instead  of  plenty.) 

Let  us  picture  a  small  island  inhabited  by  six  men.  One 
of  these  men  fishes,  another  hunts,  another  gathers  cocoanuts, 
another  raises  goats  for  clothing,  and  so  on.  The  six  men 
among  them  produce  by  their  labor  all  the  necessities  of  their 
lives,  and  they  exchange  their  products  with  one  another.  The 
island  is  productive,  and  each  of  the  men  is  free,  and  makes 
his  exchanges  on  equal  terms;  on  that  basis  the  industry  of 
the  island  can  continue  indefinitely,  and  there  will  never  be  any 
trouble.  There  may  sometimes  be  over-production,  but  it  will 
not  cause  anyone  to  starve.  If  the  fisherman  is  unusually 
lucky  one  day,  he  will  be  able  to  take  a  vacation  for  a  few 
days,  living  on  his  fish  and  the  products  he  exchanges  for 
his  fish.  For  the  sake  of  convenience  in  future  reference, 
I  will  describe  this  happy  island  as  a  "free"  society;  mean- 
ing that  each  of  the  members  of  this  society  has  access  on 
equal  terms  to  the  sources  of  wealth,  and  each  owns  the  prod- 
uct of  his  own  labor,  without  paying  tribute  to  any  one  else 
for  the  right  to  labor,  or  to  exchange  his  products. 

But  now  let  us  suppose  that  one  of  the  men  on  the  island 
is  strong  and  aggressive;  he  takes  a  club  and  knocks  down 
the  other  five  men,  and  compels  them  to  sign  a  piece  of 
paper  agreeing  that  hereafter  he  is  the  president  of  the  land 
development  company  of  the  island,  the  chief  stockholder  in 
the  goat-raising  company,  and  owner  of  the  fishing  conces- 
sion and  the  cocoanut  grove;  also,  that  hereafter  goods  shall 
not  be  bartered  in  kind,  but  shall  be  exchanged  for  money, 
and  that  he  is  the  banker,  and  also  the  government,  with 
the  right  to  issue  money.  In  this  society  you  will  find  that 
the  real  work,  the  actually  productive  work,  is  done  by  five 
men,  instead  of  by  six,  and  these  five  do  not  get  the  full  value 
of  their  labor.  The  fisherman  will  fish,  but  his  product  will 
no  longer  belong  to  himself ;  he  will  get  part  of  it  as  wages, 
while  the  "business  man"  takes  charge  of  the  balance.     So 

145 


146  Love  and  Society 

when  there  is  a  lucky  day,  there  will  be  prosperity  in  the 
fishing  industry,  but  this  prosperity  will  not  benefit  the  fisher- 
man ;  he  will  have  only  his  wage,  and  when  he  has  caught  too 
many  fish,  he  will  not  have  a  few  days'  vacation,  but  will  be 
out  of  a  job. 

And  exactly  the  same  thing  will  happen  to  the  goat-herd. 
He  will  probably  have  work  all  the  year  round,  because  goats 
have  to  be  tended,  but  he  will  get  barely  enough  to  keep  him 
alive,  and  the  surplus  skins  and  milk  will  go  to  the  owner 
of  the  no-longer-happy  island.  Perhaps  it  will  occur  to  the 
owner  that  the  man  who  raises  cocoanuts  might  also  keep  an 
eye  on  the  goats,  and  so  the  goat-herd  will  be  permanently 
out  of  a  job,  and  will  turn  into  what  is  called  a  tramp,  or 
vagrant.  Inasmuch  as  'everything  to  eat  on  the  island  belongs 
to  the  owner,  the  ex-goat-herd  will  be  tempted  to  become  a 
criminal,  and  so  it  will  be  necessary  for  the  owner  to  arm  the 
cocoanut  man  with  a  club  and  make  him  into  a  policeman; 
or  perhaps  he  will  organize  the  fisherman  and  the  hunter  into 
a  militia  for  the  preservation  of  law  and  order.  They  will 
be  glad  to  serve  him,  because,  owing  to  the  extreme  produc- 
tivity of  the  island,  they  will  be  out  of  jobs  a  great  part  of 
the  time,  and  but  for  the  generosity  of  the  business  man, 
would  have  no  way  of  earning  a  living. 

But  suppose  that  the  cocoanut  man  should  invent  a  ma- 
chine for  gathering  a  year's  supply  of  nuts  in  a  week;  sup- 
pose the  fisherman  should  devise  a  scheme  to  fill  his  boat 
with  fish  in  a  few  minutes;  and  suppose  that  as  a  result  of 
these  inventions  the  business  man  got  so  rich  that  he  moved 
to  Paris,  and  no  longer  saw  his  workers,  or  even  knew  their 
names.  Under  these  conditions  you  can  see  that  overpro- 
duction and  unemployment  might  increase  on  the  island;  and 
also  the  business  man  might  seem  less  human  and  lovable  to  his 
wage  slaves,  and  might  need  a  larger  police  force.  It  might 
even  happen  that  he  would  discover  the  need  of  a  propaganda 
department,  in  order  to  keep  his  police  force  loyal,  and  a  secret 
service  to  make  sure  that  agitators  did  not  get  into  the  schools. 

The  five  islanders,  having  filled  all  the  bams  and  store- 
houses, would  be  turned  out  to  starve;  and  when  they  asked 
the  reason,  they  would  be  told  it  was  because  they  had 
produced  a  surplus  of  food.  This  may  sound  grotesque,  but 
it  is  what  is  being  said  to  5,000,000  men  in  America  as  I 
write.     There  are  clothing-workers  who  are  going  about  in 


The  Book  of  Society  147 

rags,  and  they  are  told  it  is  because  they  have  produced  too 
much  clothing.  There  are  shoe-workers  whose  shoes  are  fall- 
ing off  their  feet,  and  they  are  told  it  is  because  they  have 
produced  too  many  shoes.  There  are  carpenters  who  have 
no  homes,  and  they  are  told  that  a  great  many  homes  are 
needed,  but  unfortunately  it  doesn't  pay  the  builders  to  go 
ahead  just  now.  This  may  sound  like  a  caricature,  but  it 
happens  to  be  the  most  prominent  single  fact  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  5,000,000  Americans  at  the  close  of  the  year 
1921.  No  wonder  they  are  discontented  with  the  present 
order. 

The  solut'on  of  the  mystery  is  so  simple  that  the  5,000,000 
unemployed  cannot  be  kept  permanently  from  understanding 
it.  The  reason  the  five  men  on  the  island  are  starving  is 
because  one  man  owns  the  island  and  the  others  own  nothing. 
If  the  island  were  community  property,  the  five  men  would 
each  own  a  share  of  the  contents  of  the  barns  and  storehouses, 
and  would  not  be  starving.  If  the  100,000,000  people  of 
America  owned  the  productive  machinery  of  America,  then 
instantly  the  unemployment  crisis  would  pass  like  an  evil 
dream.  The  farm-workers  who  need  shoes  would  exchange 
their  food  with  the  starving  shoe-workers,  and  the  starving 
shoe- workers  would  have  jobs.  They  would  want  clothing, 
and  so  the  clothing-makers  would  start  to  work;  and  so  on 
all  the  way  down  the  line.  There  is  only  one  thing  necessary 
to  make  this  possible,  and  that  is  the  thing  which  we  have 
agreed  to  call  the  social  revolution. 


CHAPTER  LVIII 
THE  IRON  RING 

J^ Analyzes  further  the  profit  system,  which  strangles  produc- 
tion, and  makes  true  prosperity  impossible.) 

We  have  seen  that  in  an  exploiting  society  there  is  a  sur- 
plus which  is  taken  by  the  exploiter;  and  that  under  the 
modern  system  this  surplus  must  be  sold  at  a  profit  before 
production  can  continue.  The  vital  fact  in  such  a  society  is 
that  the  worker  has  not  the  money  to  buy  back  all  that  he 
produces;  therefore  it  is  inevitable  that  a  surplus  product 
should  accumulate.  When  this  happens,  production  must  be 
cut  down,  and  during  that  period  the  worker  is  without  a 
job,  and  without  means  of  living.  The  fact  that  he  needs 
the  product  does  not  help  him;  the  point  is  that  he  has  not 
the  money  to  buy  it.  In  such  a  society  the  productive  ma- 
chinery is  never  used  to  the  full.  The  machinery  is  controlled 
by  a  profit-seeking  interest,  seeking  an  opportunity  to  make 
sales,  and  restricting  production  according  to  the  prospect 
of  sales.  So  the  actual  product  bears  no  relationship  to  the 
possible  product,  and  people  who  live  in  an  exploiting  society 
can  form  no  conception  of  true  prosperity. 

For,  you  see,  the  market  is  limited  by  the  competitive 
wage  system.  We  have  seen  that  in  our  own  rich,  prosperous 
country  only  one  family  out  of  six  has  more  than  $1,000 
a  year  income;  only  one  family  out  of  twelve  has  $2,000  a 
year.  It  does  not  make  any  difference  that  the  warehouses 
are  bursting  with  goods;  a  family  constitutes  a  market  of 
so  many  dollars  a  year,  and  then,  so  far  as  the  profit  system 
is  concerned,  that  family  is  non-existent;  that  family  stops 
consuming,  and  the  productive  machinery  is  halted  to  that 
extent. 

I  have  been  accustomed  to  portray  the  profit  system  under 
the  simile  of  an  iron  ring  riveted  about  the  body  of  a  baby. 
That  ring  would  cause  the  baby  some  discomfort  at  the  begin- 
ning, but  it  would  not  be  serious,  and  the  baby  would  get 
used  to  it.  But  as  the  baby  grew  the  trouble  caused  by  fiie 
ring  would  increase,   and  finally  there  would  come  a  time 

148 


The  Book  of  Society  149 

when  the  baby  would  be  suffering  from  a  whole  complication 
of  troubles,  and  for  each  of  these  troubles  there  would  be 
but  one  remedy — ^break  the  ring.  Does  the  baby  cry  all  the 
time?  Break  the  ring!  Is  its  digestion  defective?  Break 
the  ring!  Is  it  threatened  with  convulsions  or  with  blood 
poisoning?    Break  the  ring! 

Here  is  our  industrial  society,  growing  at  a  rate  never 
equalled  by  any  human  baby ;  and  here  is  this  iron  ring  riveted 
about  its  middle.  Here  is  poverty,  here  is  unemployment, 
here  is  graft,  here  is  crime,  here  is  war  and  plague  and  famine ; 
and  for  all  these  evils  there  is  but  one  cause,  and  but  one 
remedy.  Break  the  ring!  Set  production  free  from  the 
strangulation  of  the  profit  system. 

I  will  admit  that  there  may  have  been  a  time  in  the  history 
of  the  social  infant  when  this  ring  was  necessary.  I  admit 
that  if  the  great  industrial  machine  was  to  be  constructed, 
it  was  necessary  that  the  mass  of  the  people  should  consume 
only  part  of  what  they  produced,  and  should  allow  the  bal- 
ance to  be  reinvested  as  capital.  But  now  it  has  been  done, 
and  the  process  is  complete.  We  have  a  machine  capable 
of  producing  many  times  more  than  we  can  consume;  shall 
we  still  go  on  building  that  machine  ?  Shall  we  go  on  starving 
ourselves,  to  save  the  money,  to  miiltiply  over  and  over  again 
the  products,  in  order  that  we  may  be  thrown  out  of  work, 
and  be  starved  even  more  completely? 

A  few  generations  ago  we  had  in  colonial  America  a  so- 
ciety that  in  part  at  least  was  "free."  In  that  society  every- 
body got  the  necessities  of  life.  They  did  not  have  the  modem 
Sunday  supplement  and  the  moving  picture  show,  but  they 
had  bread  and  meat  and  good  substantial  clothing,  and  fur- 
niture so  well  made  that  we  still  preserve  it.  The  children 
in  those  days  grew  up  to  be  strong  and  sturdy  men  and 
women,  who  would  have  seen  nothing  to  envy  in  the  bodies 
or  minds  of  the  slum  population  of  New  York  and  Chicago. 
In  short,  they  had  all  the  true  necessities  of  life ;  and  yet  their 
work  was  done  by  hand,  the  power  process  was  unknown  and 
undreamed  of. 

Now  comes  modern  machinery,  and  multiplies  the  pro- 
ductive power  of  the  hand  laborer  by  five,  by  ten,  sometimes 
by  a  hundred.  Here,  for  example,  is  the  "Appeal  to  Rea- 
son" selling  millions  of  cheap  books  for  ten  cents  apiece,  and 
making  a  profit  on  it;  installing  a  gigantic  press  which  takes 
11 


150  Love  and  Society 

paper,  sheet  after  sheet,  prints  128  pages  of  a  book  at  one 
impression,  and  folds  and  stitches  and  binds  the  books,  all  in 
one  process,  and  turns  them  out  complete  at  the  rate  of 
lOjOOG  copies  per  hour.  Here  is  a  factory  which  turns  out 
100,000  automobiles  a  month.  Here  is  a  mill  which  turns 
•out  many  millions  of  yards  of  cloth  a  month.  If  our  colo- 
nial ancestors  had  been  told  about  these  marvels,  they  would 
liave  said  instantly:  "Then,  of  course,  everybody  in  that 
society  will  have  all  the  books  they  want,  and  all  the  clothing 
they  want,  and  all  the  automobiles.  Everybody  in  that  society 
will  have  five  or  ten  or  one  hundred  times  as  much  goods  as  we 
have." 

Imagine  the  bewilderment  of  our  colonial  ancestor  if  he 
had  been  told:  "The  majority  of  the  people  in  that  society 
will  not  have  so  much  of  the  real  necessities  of  life  as  you 
have.  They  will  have  a  few  cheap  trinkets,  designed  to  tickle 
their  senses;  they  will  have  cheap  newspapers,  carefully  con- 
trived to  keep  their  minds  vacant  and  to  keep  them  contented 
with  their  lot;  they  will  have  moving  picture  shows  con- 
structed for  the  same  purpose;  but  all  their  material  things 
will  be  flimsy,  put  together  for  show  and  not  for  permanence ; 
their  food  will  be  adulterated,  their  clothing  will  be  shoddy, 
everything  they  have  will  be  made,  not  for  their  service,  but 
for  the  profit  of  some  one  who  lives  by  selling  to  them.  The 
average  wage  earned  by  those  who  do  the  work  of  this  new 
machine  civilization  will  be  less  than  half  the  amount  nec- 
essary to  purchase  the  necessities  of  a  decent  life,  and  one- 
tenth  of  the  total  population  will  be  living  in  such  poverty 
that  they  are  unable  to  maintain  physical  fitness,  or  to  rear 
their  children  into  full  sized  men  and  women." 


CHAPTER  LIX 

FOREIGN  MARKETS 

(Considers  the  efforts  of  capitalism  to  save  itself  by  market- 
ing its  surplus  products  abroad,  and  what  results  from  these 
efforts.) 

If  our  analysis  of  present-day  society  is  correct,  we  have 
the  enormous  populations  of  the  modern  industrial  coimtries, 
living  always  on  the  verge  of  starvation,  their  chance  for 
survival  depending  at  all  times  upon  the  ability  of  their  em- 
ployers to  find  a  profitable  market  for  a  surplus  of  goods. 
At  first  the  employer  seeks  that  market  at  home;  but  when 
the  home  markets  are  glutted,  he  goes  abroad ;  and  so  develops 
the  phenomenon  of  foreign  trade  and  rivalry  for  foreign  trade, 
as  the  basic  fact  of  capitalism,  and  the  fundamental  cause  of 
modern  war. 

Let  us  get  clear  a  simple  distinction  concerning  foreign 
trade.  There  is  a  kind  of  trade  which  is  normal,  and  would 
thrive  in  a  "free"  society.  In  the  United  States  we  can 
produce  nearly  all  the  necessities  of  life,  but  there  are  a  few 
which  we  cannot  produce — rubber,  for  example,  and  bananas, 
and  good  music.  These  things  we  wish  to  import.  We  buy 
them  from  other  countries,  and  incur  a  debt,  which  we  pay 
with  products  which  the  other  countries  need  from  us ;  wheat, 
for  example,  and  copper,  and  moving  pictures  with  cowboys 
in  them.  This  is  equal  exchange,  and  a  natural  phenomenon. 
A  "free"  society  would  produce  such  surplus  goods  as  were 
necessary  to  procure  the  foreign  products  that  it  desired. 
When  it  had  produced  that  much,  the  workers  would  stop 
and  take  a  vacation  until  they  wanted  nwre  foreign  prod- 
ucts. 

But  under  capitalism  we  have  an  entirely  different  con- 
dition— we  produce  a  surplus  of  goods  which  we  have  to  sell 
in  order  to  keep  our  factories  running,  and  to  keep  our  work- 
ing population  from  starving.  And  note  that  it  does  not  help 
us  to  get  back  an  equal  quantity  of  foreign  goods  in  ex- 
change. We  must  have  what  we  call  "a  favorable  balance"; 
that  is,  we  must  have  other  people  going  into  debt  to  us,  so 

151 


152  Love  and  Society 

that  we  can  be  continually  shipping  out  more  goods  than 
we  take  back;  continually  piling  up  credits  which  we  can 
"negotiate,"  or  turn  into  cash,  so  that  we  can  go  on  and  repeat 
the  process  of  making  more  goods,  selling  them  for  more 
profits,  and  putting  the  surplus  into  the  form  of  more  ma- 
chinery, to  make  still  more  goods  and  still  more  profits. 

And  then,  after  a  while,  we  come  upon  this  embarrassing 
phenomenon;  nations  which  buy  and  do  not  sell  must  either 
do  it  by  sending  us  gold,  or  by  our  giving  them  credit.  The 
sending  of  gold  cannot  go  on  indefinitely,  because  then  we 
should  have  all  the  gold,  and  if  other  natiens  had  none  that 
would  destroy  their  credit.  On  the  other  hand,  business  can- 
not be  done  by  credit  indefinitely;  for  the  very  essence  of 
credit  is  a  promise  to  pay,  and  payment  can  only  be  made  in 
goods,  and  how  can  we  take  the  goods  without  ruining  our 
own  industry? 

Fifteen  years  ago  I  pointed  this  out  in  a  book.  The 
argument  was  irrefutable,  and  the  conclusion  inescapable, 
but  the  few  critics  who  noted  it  repeated  their  usual  formula 
about  "dreamers  and  theorists."  Now,  however,  the  busi- 
ness mills  have  ground  on,  and  what  was  theory  has  become 
fact  before  our  eyes.  We  have  trusted  the  nations  of  Europe 
for  some  $10,000,000,000  worth  of  goods,  and  they  are  power- 
less to  pay,  and  if  they  did  pay,  they  would  bankrupt  Amer- 
ican industry.  France  wishes  to  collect  an  enormous  indem- 
nity from  Germany,  but  nobody  can  figure  out  how  this  indem- 
nity can  be  paid  without  ruining  French  industry.  The 
French  have  demanded  coal  from  Germany,  and  have  got 
more  than  they  can  use,  and  are  "dumping"  it  in  Belgium 
and  Holland,  with  the  result  that  the  British  coal  industry 
is  ruined.  The  French  clamor  that  the  Germans  must  pay 
for  the  destruction  they  wrought  in  Northern  France,  and 
the  Germans  offer  to  send  German  workmen  to  rebuild  the 
ruined  towns;  but  the  French  denounce  this  as  an  insult — it 
would  deprive  French  workingmen  of  their  jobs!  So  I  might 
continue  for  pages,  pointing  out  the  manifold  absurdities  which 
result  from  a  system  of  industry  for  the  profit  of  a  few, 
instead  of  for  the  use  of  all. 

Ever  since  I  first  began  to  read  the  newspapers,  some 
twenty-five  or  thirty  years  ago,  all  our  political  life  has  been 
nothing  but  the  convulsions  of  a  social  body  tortured  by  the 
constricting  ring  of  the  profit  system.    Everywhere  one  group 


The  Book  of  Society  153 

struggling  for  advantage  over  another  group,  and  politicians 
engaged  in  playing  one  interest  against  another  interest!  My 
boyhood  recollections  of  public  life  consist  of  campaign  slo- 
gans having  to  do  with  the  tariff:  "production  and  prosper- 
ity," "reciprocity,"  "the  full  dinner  pail,"  "the  foreigner  pays 
the  tax,"  etc. 

The  workingman,  under  the  profit  system,  is  like  a  man 
pounding  away  at  a  pump.  He  can  get  a  thin  trickle  of 
water  from  the  spout  of  the  pump  if  he  works  hard  enough, 
but  in  order  to  get  it  he  has  to  supply  ten  times  as  much  to 
some  one  who  has  tapped  the  pipe.  But  the  tapping  has  been 
done  underground,  where  the  workingman  cannot  see  it.  All 
the  workingman  knows  is  that  there  is  no  job  for  him  if  the 
products  of  "cheap  foreign  labor"  are  allowed  to  be  "dumped" 
on  the  American  market.  That  is  obvious,  and  so  he  votes 
for  a  tax  on  foreign  imports,  high  enough  to  enable  his  own 
employer  to  market  at  a  profit.  He  does  not  realize  that  he 
is  thus  raising  the  price  of  everything  that  he  buys,  and  so 
leaving  himself  worse  off  than  he  was  before. 

All  governments  are  delighted  with  this  tariff  device,  be- 
cause they  are  thus  enabled  to  get  money  from  the  public 
without  the  public's  knowing  it.  "The  foreigner  pays  the 
tax,"  we  are  told,  and  as  a  result  of  this  arrangement  the 
steel  trust  just  before  the  war  was  selling  its  product  at  a 
high  price  to  the  American  people,  and  taking  its  surplus 
abroad  and  selling  it  to  the  foreigner  at  half  the  domestic 
price.  And  we  see  this  same  thing  in  every  line  of  manufac- 
ture, and  all  over  the  world.  We  see  one  nation  after  another 
withdrawing  itself  as  a  market  for  manufactured  products, 
and  entering  the  lists  as  a  marketer.  One  more  nation  now 
able  to  fill  all  its  own  needs,  and  going  out  hungrily  to  look 
ior  foreign  customers,  adding  to  the  glut  of  the  world's  manu- 
factured products  and  the  ferocity  of  international  compe- 
tition ! 

At  the  close  of  the  Civil  War  the  total  exports  of  the  United 
States  averaged  approximately  $300,000,000,  and  the  total  im- 
ports were  about  the  same.  In  1892  the  exports  first  touched 
$1,000,000,000,  while  the  imports  were  about  nine-tenths  of 
tliat  sum.  In  the  year  1913  the  exports  were  nearly  $2,500,- 
000,000,  while  the  imports  were  $600,000,000  less ;  and  in  the 
year  1920  our  exports  were  over  $8,000,000,000  and  our  im- 
ports a  little  over  $5,000,000,000!    So  we  have  a  "favorable 


154  Love  and  Society 

balance"  of  almost  $3,000,000,000  a  year — and  as  a  result  we 
are  on  the  verge  of  ruin ! 

This  "iron  ring"  of  overproduction  and  lack  of  market 
exercises  upon  our  industrial  body  a  steady  pressure,  a  slow 
strangling.  But  because  the  body  is  in  convulsions,  strug- 
gling to  break  the  ring,  the  pressure  of  the  ring  is  worse  at 
some  times  than  at  others.  We  have  periods  of  what  we  call 
"prosperity,"  followed  by  periods  of  panic  and  hard  times. 
You  must  understand  that  only  a  small  part  of  our  business 
is  done  by  means  of  cash  payments,  whether  in  gold  or  silver 
or  paper  money.  Close  to  99%  of  our  business  is  done  by 
means  of  credit,  and  this  introduces  into  the  process  a  psy- 
chological factor.  The  business  man  expects  certain  profits, 
and  he  capitalizes  these  expectations.  Business  boonw,  be- 
cause everybody  believes  everybody  else's  promises ;  credit 
expands  like  a  huge  balloon,  with  the  breath  of  everybody's 
enthusiasm.  But  meantime  real  business,  the  real  market, 
remains  just  what  it  was  before;  it  cannot  increase,  because 
of  the  iron  ring  which  restricts  the  buying  power  of  the 
mass  of  the  people  by  the  competitive  wage.  So  presently 
the  time  comes  when  somebody  realizes  that  he  has  over-capital- 
ized his  hopes;  he  curtails  his  orders,  he  calls  in  his  money, 
and  the  impulse  thus  started  precipitates  a  crash  in  the  whole 
business  world.  We  had  such  a  crash  in  1907,  and  I  remem- 
ber a  Wall  Street  man  explaining  it  in  a  magazine  article 
entitled,  "Somebody  Asked  for  a  Dollar." 

We  learned  one  lesson  by  that  panic;  at  least,  the  big 
financial  men  learned  it,  and  had  Congress  pass  what  is  called 
the  "Federal  Reserve  Act,"  a  provision  whereby  in  time  of 
need  the  government  issues  practically  unlimited  credit  to 
banks.  This,  of  course,  is  fine  for  the  banks;  it  puts  the 
credit  of  everybody  else  behind  them,  and  all  they  have  to 
do  is  to  stop  lending  money — except  to  the  big  insiders — 
and  sit  back  and  wait,  while  the  little  men  go  to  the  wall, 
and  the  mass  of  us  live  on  our  savings  or  starve.  We  saw 
this  happen  in  the  year  1920,  and  for  the  first  time  we  had 
"hard  times"  without  having  a  financial  panic.  But  instead 
we  see  prices  staying  high — because  the  banks  have  issued  so 
much  paper  money  and  bank  credits. 


CHAPTER  LX 
CAPITALIST  WAR 

(Shows  how  the  competition  for  foreign  markets  leads  nations 
automatically  into  war.) 

In  a  discussion  of  the  world's  economic  situation,  pub- 
lished in  1906,  the  writer  portrayed  the  ruling  class  of  Ger- 
many as  sitting  in  front  of  a  thermometer,  watching  the 
mercury  rising,  and  knowing  that  when  it  reached  the  top, 
the  thermometer  would  break.  This  thermometer  was  the 
German  class  system  of  government,  and  the  mercury  was 
the  Socialist  vote.  In  1870  the  vote  was  30,000,  in  1884  it 
was  549,000,  in  1893  it  was  1,876,000,  in  1903  it  was  3,008,- 
000,  in  1907  it  was  3,250,000,  in  1911  it  was  4,250,000. 
Writing  between  1906  and  1913,  I  again  and  again  pointed  out 
that  this  increase  was  the  symptom  of  social  discontent  in 
Germany,  caused  by  the  overproduction  of  invested  capital 
throughout  the  world,  and  the  intensification  of  the  competi- 
tion for  world  markets.  I  pointed  out  that  a  slight  increase 
in  the  vote  would  be  sufficient  to  transfer  to  the  working  class 
of  Germany  the  political  power  of  the  German  state;  and  I 
said  that  the  ruling  class  of  Germany  would  never  permit 
that  to  happen — when  it  was  ready  to  happen  Germany  would 
go  to  war,  to  seize  the  trade  privileges  of  some  other  nation. 

There  was  a  time  when  wars  were  caused  by  national 
and  racial  hatreds.  There  are  still  enough  of  these  venerable 
prejudices  left  in  the  world,  but  no  student  of  the  subject 
would  deny  that  the  main  source  of  modem  wars  is  commer- 
cial rivalry.  In  1917  we  sent  Eugene  V.  Debs  to  prison  for 
declaring  that  the  late  world  war  was  a  war  of  capitalist 
greed.  But  two  years  later  President  Wilson,  who  had  waged 
the  war,  declared  in  a  public  speech  that  everybody  knew  it 
had  been  a  war  of  commercial  rivalries. 

The  aims  of  modern  war-makers  are  two.  First,  capital- 
ism must  have  raw  materials,  including  coal  and  oil,  the 
sources  of  power,  and  gold  and  silver,  the  bases  of  credit. 
Parts  of  the  world  which  are  so  unfortunate  as  to  be  rich 
in  these  substances  become  the  bone  of  contention  between 
rival  financial  groups,  organized  as  nations.  Some  sarcastic 
writer  has  defined  a  "backward"  nation  as  one  which  has 
gold  mines  and  no  navy.     We  are  horrified  to  read  of  the 

155 


156  Love  and  Society 

wars  of  the  French  monarchs,  caused  by  the  jealous  quar- 
rels of  mistresses;  but  in  1905  we  saw  Russia  and  Japan  go 
to  war  and  waste  a  million  lives  because  certain  Russian  grand 
dukes  had  bribed  certain  Chinese  mandarins  and  obtained  con- 
cessions of  timber  on  the  Yalu  River.  We  now  observe  France 
and  Germany  vowed  to  undying  hate  because  of  iron  mines 
in  Lorraine,  and  the  efforts  of  France  to  take  the  coal  mines 
of  Silesia  from  Germany,  and  give  them  to  Poland,  which  is 
another  name  for  French  capitalism. 

The  other  end  sought  by  the  war-makers  is  markets  for 
manufactured  products,  and  control  of  trade  routes,  coaling 
stations  and  cables  necessary  to  the  building  up  of  foreign 
trade.  England  has  been  "mistress  of  the  seas"  for  some  300 
years,  which  meant  that  her  traders  had  obtained  most  of 
these  advantages.  But  then  came  Germany,  with  her  newly 
develoDed  commercialism,  shoving  her  rival  out  of  the  way. 
The  Englishman  was  easy-going;  he  liked  to  play  cricket, 
and  stop  and  drink  tea  every  afternoon.  But  the  German 
worked  all  day  and  part  of  the  night;  he  trained  himself  as 
a  specialist,  he  studied  the  needs  of  his  customers — all  of 
which  to  the  Englishman  was  "unfair"  competition.  But  here 
were  the  populations  of  the  crowded  slums,  dependent  for 
their  weekly  wage  and  their  daily  bread  upon  the  ability  of 
the  factories  to  go  on  turning  out  products!  Here  was  the 
ever-blackening  shadow  of  unemployment,  the  mutterings  of 
social  discontent,  the  agitators  on  the  soap-boxes,  the  workers 
listening  to  them  with  more  and  more  eager  attention,  and 
the  journalists  and  politicians  and  bankers  watching  this  phe- 
nomenon with  a  ghastly  fear. 

So  came  the  great  war.  Social  discontent  was  forgotten 
over  night,  and  England  and  France  plunged  in  to  down  their 
hated  rival,  once  and  for  all  time.  Now  they  have  succeeded : 
Germany's  ships  have  been  taken  from  her,  and  likewise  her 
cables  and  coaling  stations;  the  Berlin-Bagdad  Railroad  is  a 
forgotten  dream;  the  British  sit  in  Constantinople,  and  the 
traffic  goes  by  sea.  American  capitalism  wakes  up,  and  rubs 
its  eyes  after  a  debauch  of  Presbyterian  idealism,  and  dis- 
covers that  it  has  paid  out  sopie  $20,000,000,000,  in  order  to 
confer  all  these  privileges  and  advantages  upon  its  rivals! 

Ever  since  I  can  remember  the  world,  there  have  been 
peace  societies;  I  look  back  in  history  and  discover  that  ever 
since  there  have  been  wars,  there  have  been   prophets   de- 


The  Book  of  SociiyrY  157 

claiming  against  them  in  the  name  of  humanity  and  God.  As 
1  write,  there  is  a  great  world  conference  on  disarmament 
in  session  in  Washington,  and  all  good  Americans  hope  that 
war  is  to  be  ended  and  permanent  peace  made  safe.  AH  that 
I  can  do  at  this  juncture  is  to  point  out  the  fundamental 
and  all-controlling  fact  of  present-day  economics :  that  for  the 
ruling  class  of  any  country  to  agree  to  disarmament  and  the 
abolition  of  war,  is  for  that  class  to  sign  its  own  death  war- 
rant and  cut  its  own  throat.  American  capitalism  can  sur- 
vive on  this  earth  only  by  strangling  and  destroying  Japanese 
capitalism  and  British  capitalism,  and  doing  it  before  long. 
The  far-sighted  capitalists  on  both  sides  know  that,  and  are 
making  their  preparations  accordingly. 

What  the  members  of  the  peace  societies  and  the  diplo- 
mats of  the  disarmament  conferences  do  is  to  cut  off  the 
branches  of  the  tree  of  war.  They  leave  the  roots  untouched, 
and  then,  when  the  tree  continues  to  thrive,  they  are  astounded. 
I  conclude  this  chapter  with  a  concrete  illustration,  cut  from 
my  morning  newspaper.  We  went  to  war  against  German 
militarism,  and  to  make  the  world  safe  for  democracy — mean- 
ing thereby  capitalist  commercialism.  We  commanded  the 
German  people  to  "beat  their  swords  into  plough-shares"; 
that  is,  to  set  their  Krupp  factories  to  making  tools  of  peace; 
and  they  did  so.  We  saddled  them  with  an  enormous  indem- 
nity, making  them  our  serfs  for  a  generation  or  two,  and 
compelling  them  to  hasten  out  into  the  world  markets,  to  sell 
their  goods  and  raise  gold  to  pay  us.  And  now,  how  does 
their  behavior  strike  us?  Do  we  praise  their  industry,  and 
fidelity  to  their  obligations?  Here  are  the  headlines  of  a  news 
despatch,  published  by  the  Los  Angeles  Times  on  December 
10,  1921,  at  the  top  of  the  front  page,  right  hand  column, 
the  most  conspicuous  position  in  the  paper.  Read  it,  and 
understand  the  sources  of  modern  war ! 

NEW  ATTACK  BY  BERLIN 


DUMPING  GOODS  BY  WHOLESALE 


Cheap  German  Trash  Puts  Thousands  of  Americans 
Out  of  Employment 


Glove  Plants  Shut  Down  and  Potash  Industry  Killed 
by  Teuton  Intrigue 


CHAPTER  LXI 
THE  POSSIBILITIES  OF  PRODUCTION 

(Shows  how  much  wealth  we  could  produce  if  we  tried,  and 
how  we  proved  it  when  we  had  to.) 

One  of  the  commonest  arguments  in  defense  of  the  present 
business  system  runs  as  follows :  The  amount  of  money  which 
is  paid  to  labor  is  greatly  in  excess  of  the  amount  which  is 
paid  to  capital.  Suppose  that  tomorrow  you  were  to  abolish 
all  dividends  and  profits,  and  divide  the  money  up  among 
the  wage  workers,  how  much  would  each  one  get?  The 
sum  is  figured  for  some  big  industry,  and  it  is  shown  that 
each  worker  would  get  one  or  two  hundred  dollars  additional 
per  year.  Obviously,  this  would  not  bring  the  millennium; 
it  would  hardly  be  worth  while  to  take  the  risk  of  reducing 
production  in  order  to  gain  so  small  a  result. 

But  now  we  are  in  position  to  realize  the  fallacy  of  such 
an  argument.  The  tax  which  capital  levies  upon  labor  is  not 
the  amount  which  capital  takes  for  itself,  but  the  amount 
which  it  prevents  labor  from  producing.  The  real  injury  of 
the  profit  system  is  not  that  it  pays  so  large  a  reward  to  a 
ruling  class ;  it  is  the  "iron  ring"  which  it  fastens  about  indus- 
try, barring  the  workers  from  access  to  the  machinery  of 
production  except  when  the  product  can  be  sold  for  a  profit. 
Labor  pays  an  enormous  reward  to  the  business  man  for  his 
management  of  industry,  but  it  would  pay  labor  to  reward 
the  business  man  even  more  highly,  if  only  he  would  take 
his  goods  in  kind,  and  would  permit  labor,  after  this  tax  is 
paid,  to  go  on  making  those  things  which  labor  itself  so  des- 
perately needs. 

But,  you  see,  the  business  m^n  does  not  take  his  goods 
in  kind.  The  owner  of  a  great  automobile  factory  may  make 
for  himself  one  automobile  or  a  score  of  automobiles,  but 
he  quickly  comes  to  a  limit  where  he  has  no  use  for  any 
more,  and  what  he  wants  is  to  sell  automobiles  and  "make 
money."  He  does  not  permit  his  workers  to  make  auto- 
mobiles for  themselves,  or  for  any  one  else.  He  reserves 
the  product  of  the   factory  for  himself,  and  when  he  can 

158 


The  Book  of  Society  159 

no  longer  sell  automobiles  at  a  profit,  he  shuts  the  workers 
out  and  automobile-making  comes  to  an  end  in  that  com- 
munity. Thus  it  appears  that  the  "iron  ring"  which  strangles 
the  income  of  labor,  strangles  equally  the  income  of  capital. 
It  paralyzes  the  whole  social  body,  and  so  limits  production 
that  we  can  form  no  conception  of  what  prosperity  might 
and  ought  to  be. 

Consider  the  situation  before  the  war.  We  were  all  of 
us  at  work  under  the  competitive  system,  and  with  the  excep- 
tion of  a  few  parasites,  everybody  was  occupied  pretty  close 
to  the  limit  of  his  energy.  If  any  one  had  said  that  it  would 
be  possible  for  our  community  to  pitch  in  and  double  or 
treble  our  output,  you  would  have  laughed  at  him.  But  sud- 
denly we  found  ourselves  at  war,  and  in  need  of  a  great 
increase  in  output,  and  we  resolved  one  and  all  to  achieve 
this  end.  We  did  not  waste  any  time  in  theoretical  discus- 
sions about  the  rights  of  private  capital,  or  the  dangers  of 
bureaucracy  and  the  destruction  of  initiative.  Our  govern- 
ment stepped  in  and  took  control;  it  took  the  railroads  and 
systematized  them,  it  took  the  big  factories  and  told  them 
exactly  what  to  make,  it  took  the  raw  materials  and  allotted 
them  where  they  were  needed,  it  fixed  the  prices  of  labor, 
and  ordered  millions  of  men  to  this  or  that  place,  to  this  or 
that  occupation.  It  even  seized  the  foodstuffs  and  directed 
what  people  should  eat.  In  a  thousand  ways  it  suppressed 
competition  and  replaced  it  by  order  and  system.  And  what 
was  the  result? 

We  took  five  million  of  our  young  men,  the  very  cream  of 
our  industrial  force,  and  withdrew  them  from  all  productive 
activities;  we  put  them  into  uniforms,  and  put  them  through 
a  training  which  meant  that  they  were  eating  more  food  and 
wearing  more  clothing  and  consuming  more  goods  than  nine- 
tenths  of  them  had  ever  done  in  their  lives  before.  We 
built  camps  for  them,  and  supplied  them  with  all  kinds  of 
costly  products  of  labor,  such  as  guns  and  cartridges,  auto- 
mobiles and  airplanes.  We  treated  two  million  of  them  to  an 
expensive  trip  to  Europe,  and  there  we  set  them  to  work 
burning  up  and  destroying  the  products  of  industry,  to  the 
value  of  many  billions  of  dollars.  And  not  only  did  we  sup- 
ply our  own  armies,  we  supplied  the  armies  of  all  our  allies. 
We  built  millions  of  dollars  worth  of  ships,  and  we  sent  over 
to  Europe,  whether  by  private  business  or  by  government  loans. 


160  Love  and  Society 

some  $10,000,000,000  worth  of  goods — more  than  ten  years  of 
our  exports  before  the  war. 

All  the  labor  necessary  to  produce  all  this  wealth  had  to 
be  withdrawn  from  industry,  so  far  as  concerned  our  domes- 
tic uses  and  needs.  It  would  not  be  too  much  to  say  that 
from  domestic  industry  we  withdrew  a  total  of  ten  million 
of  our  most  capable  labor  force.  I  think  it  would  be  rea- 
sonable to  say  that  two-thirds  of  our  productive  energies  went 
to  war  purposes,  and  only  one-third  was  available  for  home 
use.  And  yet,  we  did  it  without  a  particle  of  real  suffering. 
Many  of  us  worked  hard,  but  few  of  us  worked  harder  than 
usual.  Most  of  us  got  along  with  less  wheat  and  sugar,  but 
nobody  starved,  nobody  really  suffered  ill  health,  and  our 
poor  made  higher  wages  and  had  better  food  than  ever  in 
their  lives  before.  If  this  argument  is  sound,  it  proves  that 
our  productive  machinery  is  capable,  when  properly  organized 
and  directed,  of  producing  three  times  the  common  neces- 
sities of  our  population.  Assuming  that  our  average  work- 
ing day  is  nine  hours,  we  could  produce  what  we  at  present 
consume  by  three  hours  of  intelligently  directed  work  per 
day. 

Let  us  look  at  the  matter  from  another  angle.  Just  at 
present  the  hero  of  the  American  business  man  is  Herbert 
Hoover;  and  Mr.  Hoover  recently  appointed  a  committee, 
not  of  Socialists  and  "Utopians,"  but  of  engineering  experts, 
to  make  a  study  of  American  productive  methods.  The 
report  showed  that  American  industry  was  only  thirty-five  or 
forty  per  cent  efficient.  Incidentally,  this  "Committee  on 
Waste"  assessed,  in  the  case  of  the  building  industry,  sixty- 
five  per  cent  of  the  blame  against  management  and  only 
twenty-one  per  cent  against  labor;  in  six  fundamental  indus- 
tries it  assessed  fifty  per  cent  of  the  blame  against  manage- 
ment and  less  than  twenty-five  per  cent  against  labor.  Fifteen 
years  ago  a  professor  of  engineering,  Sidney  A.  Reeve  by 
name,  made  an  elaborate  study  of  the  wastes  involved  in 
our  haphazard  and  planless  industrial  methods,  and  embodied 
his  findings  in  a  book,  "The  Cost  of  Competition."  His  con- 
clusion was  that  of  the  total  amount  of  energy  expended  in 
America,  more  than  seventy  per  cent  was  wasted.  We  were 
doing  one  hundred  per  cent  of  work  and  getting  thirty  per  cent 
of  results.  If  we  would  get  one  hundred  per  cent  of  results, 
we  should  produce  three  and  one-third  times  as  much  wealth. 


The  Book  of  Society  161 

and  the  income  of  our  workers  would  be  increased  one  or 
two  thousand  dollars  a  year. 

Robert  Blatchford  in  his  book,  "Merrie  England,"  has  a 
saying  to  the  effect  that  it  makes  all  the  diflFerence,  when  half 
a  dozen  men  go  out  to  catch  a  horse,  whether  they  spend  their 
time  catching  the  horse  or  keeping  one  another  from  catching 
the  horse.  Our  next  task  will  be  to  point  out  a  few  of  the 
ways  in  which  good,  honest  American  business  men  and 
workingmen,  laboring  as  intelligently  and  conscientiously  as 
they  know  how,  waste  their  energies  in  keeping  one  another 
from  producing  goods. 


CHAPTER  LXII 

THE  COST  OF  COMPETITION 

(Discusses  the  losses  of  friction  in  our  productive  machine, 
those  which  are  obvious  and  those  which  are  hidden.) 

The  United  States  government  is  by  far  the  largest  single 
business  enterprise  in  the  United  States;  and  a  study  of  con- 
gressional appropriations  in  1920,  made  by  the  United  States 
Bureau  of  Standards,  reveals  the  fact  that  ninety-three  per 
cent  of  the  total  income  of  the  government  went  to  paying 
for  past  wars  or  preparing  for  future  wars.  We  have  shown 
that  modern  war  is  a  product  of  the  profit  system,  and  if 
civilized  nations  would  put  their  industry  upon  a  co-opera- 
tive basis,  they  could  forget  the  very  idea  of  war,  and  we 
should  then  receive  fourteen  times  as  much  benefit  from 
our  government  as  we  receive  at  present;  we  should  have 
fourteen  times  as  good  roads,  fourteen  times  as  many  schools, 
fourteen  times  as  prompt  a  postoffice  and  fourteen  times  as 
efficient  a  Congress.  What  it  would  mean  to  industry  to  abol- 
ish war  is  something  wholly  beyond  the  power  of  our  imagina- 
tion to  conceive;  for  along  with  ninety-three  per  cent  of  our 
government  money  there  goes  into  military  preparation  the 
vast  bulk  of  our  intellectual  energy  and  inventive  genius,  our 
moral  and  emotional  equipment. 

Next,  strikes  and  the  losses  incidental  to  strikes,  and  the 
costs  of  preparing  against  strikes.  This  includes,  not  merely 
the  actual  loss  of  working  time,  it  includes  police  and  militia, 
private  armies  of  gunmen,  and  great  secret  service  agencies, 
whose  total  income  runs  up  into  hundreds  of  millions  of 
dollars  per  year.  Industrial  warfare  is  simply  the  method 
by  which  capitalists  and  w»rkers  determine  the  division  of  the 
product  of  industry;  as  if  two  men  should  co-operate  in  rais- 
ing poultry,  and  then  fall  to  quarrelling  over  the  ownership 
of  the  eggs,  and  settle  the  matter  by  throwing  the  eggs  at 
each  other's  heads. 

Next,  bankruptcy.  Statistics  show  that  regularly  some 
ten  per  cent  of  our  business  enterprises  fail  every  year.  Take 
any  block  occupied  by  little  business  men,  grocers  and  haber- 

162 


The  Book  of  Society  163 

dashers  and  "notions,"  and  you  will  see  that  they  are  always 
changing.  Each  change  represents  a  human  tragedy,  and  the 
total  is  a  frightful  waste  of  human  energy;  it  happens  be- 
cause we  can  think  of  no  better  way  to  distribute  goods  than 
to  go  through  the  work  of  setting  up  a  business,  and  then 
discover  that  it  cannot  succeed  because  the  neighborhood  is 
already  overstocked  with  that  kind  of  goods. 

Next,  fires  which  are  a  result  of  bankruptcy.  You  may 
laugh,  perhaps,  thinking  that  I  am  making  a  joke;  but  every 
little  man  who  fails  in  business  knows  that  he  has  a  choice 
of  going  down  in  the  social  scale,  or  of  setting  fire  to  his  stock 
some  night,  and  having  a  big  insurance  company  set  him  on 
his  feet  again.  The  result  is  that  a  certain  percentage  of 
bankrupts  do  regularly  set  fire  to  their  stores.  Some  fifteen 
years  ago  there  was  published  in  "Collier's  Weekly"  a  study  of 
the  costs  to  society  of  incendiary  fires.  The  Fire  Under- 
writers' Association  estimated  the  amount  as  a  quarter  of  a 
billion  dollars  a  year ;  and  all  this  cost,  you  understand,  is  paid 
out  of  the  pockets  of  those  who  insure  their  homes  and  their 
stores,  and  do  not  burn  them  down. 

From  this  follows  the  costs  of  insurance,  and  the  whole 
insurance  industry,  jvhich  is  inevitable  under  the  profit  sys- 
tem, but  is  entire  waste  so  far  as  true  production  is  concerned. 
Big  enterprises  like  the  Steel  Trust  do  not  carry  insurance, 
and  neither  does  the  United  States  Postoffice.  They  are 
wealthy  enough  to  stand  their  own  losses.  A  national 
co-operative  enterprise  would  be  in  the  same  position,  and  the 
whole  business  of  collecting  money  for  insurance  and  keep- 
ing records  and  carrying  on  lawsuits  would  be  forgotten. 

Next,  advertising.  It  would  be  no  exaggeration  to  say 
that  seventy  per  cent  of  the  material  published  in  American 
newspapers  and  magazines  today  is  pure  waste;  and  there- 
fore seventy  per  cent  of  the  labor  of  all  the  people  who  cut 
down  forests  and  manufacture  and  transport  paper  and  set 
up  type  and  print  and  distribute  publications  is  wasted.  There 
is,  of  course,  a  small  percentage  of  advertising  that  is  useful, 
but  most  of  it  is  boasting  and  falsehood,  and  even  where  it 
tells  the  truth  it  simply  represents  the  effort  of  a  merchant 
to  persuade  you  to  buy  in  his  store  instead  of  in  a  rival 
store — an  achievement  which  is  profitable  to  the  merchant, 
but  utterly  useless  to  society  as  a  whole. 

This  same  statement  applies  to  all  traveling  salesmen,  and 


164  Lo\TE  AND  Society 

to  a  great  percentage  of  middlemen.  It  applies  also  to  a 
great  part  of  delivery  service.  If  you  live  in  a  crowded  part 
of  any  city,  you  see  a  dozen  milk  wagons  pass  your  door 
every  morning,  doing  the  work  which  could  be  done  exactly 
as  well  by  one.  That  is  only  one  case  out  of  a  thousand  I  might 
name. 

Next,  crime.  I  have  already  discussed  the  crime  of  arson, 
and  I  might  discuss  the  crimes  of  pocket-picking,  burglary, 
forgery,  and  a  hundred  others  in  the  same  way.  I  am  aware 
of  the  fact  that  there  may  be  a  few  born  criminals ;  there  may 
be  a  few  congenital  cheats,  whom  we  should  have  to  put  in 
hospitals.  But  we  have  only  to  consult  the  crime  records, 
during  the  war  and  after  the  war,  in  order  to  see  that  when 
jobs  are  hunting  men  there  are  few  criminals,  and  when  men 
are  hunting  jobs  there  are  many  criminals,  I  have  no  figures 
as  to  the  cost  of  administering  justice  in  the  United  States — 
policemen,  courts  and  jails — ^but  it  must  be  hundreds  of  mil- 
lions of  dollars  every  year. 

I  have  discussed  at  great  length  the  suppression  of  the  pro- 
ductive power  of  society.  I  should  not  fail  to  mention  the  sup- 
pression of  the  inventive  power  of  society,  a  factor  less  obvious, 
but  probably  in  the  long  run  even  greater.  Every  one  familiar 
with  the  inside  of  a  big  industry  knows  that  hundreds  and  even 
thousands  of  useful  processes  are  entirely  suppressed,  because 
it  would  not  pay  one  particular  concern  to  stand  the  expense  of 
the  changes  involved.  You  know  how,  during  the  war,  our  gov- 
ernment brought  all  the  makers  of  engines  together  and  per- 
fected in  triumph  a  "Liberty  motor."  But  now  we  have  gone 
back  to  private  interest  and  competition,  and  each  concern  is 
jealously  engaged  in  guarding  its  own  secrets,  and  depriving 
industry  as  a  whole  of  the  benefit  of  everything  that  it  learns. 
Each  is  spying  upon  the  others,  stealing  the  secrets  of  the 
others,  stealing  likewise  from  those  who  invent  new  ideas — and 
thus  discouraging  them  from  inventing  any  more. 

I  use  this  word  "discourage,"  and  I  might  write  a  chapter 
upon  it.  What  human  imagination  can  conceive  the  amount  of 
social  energy  that  is  lost  because  of  the  factor  of  discourage- 
ment, directly  caused  by  the  competitive  mfethod  ?  Who  can 
figure  what  it  means  to  human  society  that  a  great  percentage 
of  the  people  in  it  should  be  haunted  by  fear  of  one  sort  or 
another — ^the  poor  in  fear  of  unemployment,  sickness  and 
starvation,  the  little  business  man  in  fear  of  bankruptcy  and 


The  Book  of  Society  165 

suicide,  the  big  business  man  in  fear  of  hard  times  and  treachery 
of  his  competitors,  the  idle  rich  in  fear  of  robbery  and  black- 
mail, and  the  whole  community  in  fear  of  foreign  war  and 
domestic  tumult! 

Anyone  might  go  on  and  elaborate  these  factors  that  I  have 
named,  and  think  of  scores  of  others.  Anyone  familiar  with 
business  life  or  with  industrial  processes  would  be  able  to  put 
his  finger  on  this  or  that  enormous  saving  which  he  would  be 
able  to  make  if  he  and  all  his  rivals  could  combine  and  come  to 
an  agreement.  This  has  been  proven  over  and  over  again  in 
large-scale  industry ;  it  is  the  fact  which  has  made  of  large-scale 
industry  an  overwhelming  power,  sucking  all  the  profits  to 
itself,  reaching  out  and  taking  in  new  fields  of  human  activity, 
and  setting  at  naught  all  popular  clamor  and  even  legal  terrors. 
How  can  anyone,  seeing  these  facts,  bring  himself  to  deny  that 
if  we  did  systematize  production  and  make  it  one  enterprise, 
precisely  adapted  to  one  end,  we  should  enormously  increase  the 
results  of  human  labor,  and  the  benefit  to  all  who  do  the  world's 
work? 

A  good  deal  of  this  waste  we  can  stop  when  we  get  ready, 
and  other  parts  of  it  our  bountiful  mother  nature  will  replace. 
When  in  a  world  war  we  kill  some  ten  or  twenty  millions  of  the 
flower  of  our  young  manhood,  we  have  only  to  wait  several 
generations,  and  our  race  will  be  as  good  as  ever.  But,  on  the 
other  hand,  there  is  some  waste  that  can  never  be  repaired, 
and  this  is  the  thing  truly  frightful  to  contemplate.  When 
we  dig  the  iron  ore  out  of  the  bowels  of  the  earth  and  rust  it 
away  in  wars,  we  are  doing  something  our  race  can  never  undo. 
And  the  same  is  true  of  many  of  our  precious  substances : 
phosphorus,  sulphur,  potash.  When  we  cut  down  the  forests 
from  our  mountain  slopes,  and  lay  bare  the  earth,  we  not 
merely  cause  floods  and  washouts,  and  silt  up  our  harbors,  we 
take  away  from  the  surface  of  our  land  the  precious  life-giving 
soil,  and  make  a  habitable  land  into  a  desert,  which  no  irrigating 
and  reforesting  can  ever  completely  restore.  The  Chinese  have 
done  that  for  many  centuries,  and  we  are  following  in  their 
footsteps ;  more  than  six  hundred  million  wagon-loads  of  our 
best  soil  are  washed  down  to  the  sea  every  year !  If  you  wish  to 
know  about  these  matters,  I  send  you  to  a  book,  "On  Board  the 
Good  Ship  Earth,"  by  Herbert  Quick.  It  is  one  of  the  most 
heart-breaking  books  you  ever  read,  yet  it  is  merely  a  quiet 
statement  of  the  facts  about  our  present  commercial  anarchy. 


CHAPTER   LXIII 

SOCIALISM  AND  SYNDICALISM 

(Discusses  the  idea  of  the  management  of  industry  by  the 
state,  and  the  idea  of  its  management  by  the  trade  unions.) 

Let  us  now  assume  that  we  desire  to  abolish  the  wastes  of 
the  competitive  method,  and  to  put  our  industry  on  a  basis  of 
co-operation.  How  should  we  effect  the  change,  and  how 
should  we  run  our  industry  after  it  was  done? 

Let  us  take  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation.  What 
change  would  be  necessary  to  the  socializing  of  this  concern? 
United  States  Steel  is  owned  by  a  group  of  stockholders,  and 
governed  by  a  board  of  directors  elected  by  them.  The  owners 
are  now  to  be  bought  out  with  government  bonds,  and  the  board 
of  directors  retired.  It  may  also  be  necessary  to  replace  a  cer- 
tain number  of  the  higher  executive  officials,  who  are  imbued 
entirely  with  the  point  of  view  of  this  board,  and  have  to  do 
with  finance,  rather  than  with  production.  Of  course,  some 
other  governing  authority  would  have  to  be  put  in  control. 
What  would  this  authority  be  ?  There  are  several  plans  before 
the  world,  several  different  schools  of  thought,  which  we  shall 
consider  one  by  one. 

First,  the  Socialist  program.  The  Socialist  says,  "Consider 
the  post-office,  how  that  is  run.  It  is  run  by  the  President,  who 
appoints  a  Postmaster-General  as  his  executive.  Let  us  there- 
fore turn  the  steel  industry  over  to  the  government,  and  let  the 
President  appoint  another  member  of  his  cabinet,  a  Director  of 
Steel;  or  let  there  be  a  commission,  similar  to  the  Interstate 
Commerce  Commission,  or  the  various  war  industry  boards." 
Any  form  of  management  of  the  steel  industry  which  provides 
for  its  control  and  operation  by  our  United  States  government 
is  Socialism  of  one  sort  or  another. 

There  has  been,  of  late,  a  great  deal  of  dissatisfaction  with 
government,  on  the  part  of  the  general  public,  and  also  of  labor. 
The  postoffice  clerks,  for  example,  complain  that  they  are  in- 
adequately paid  and  autocratically  managed,  deprived  of  their 
rights  not  merely  as  workers  but  as  citizens.  The  steel  workers 
complain  that  when  they  go  on  strike  against  their  masters,  the 

166 


The  Book  of  Society  167 

government  sends  in  troops  and  crushes  their  strike,  regardless 
of  the  rights  or  wrongs  of  it.  In  order  to  meet  such  tactics, 
labor  goes  into  politics,  and  elects  here  and  there  its  own  repre- 
sentatives; but  these  representatives  become  mysteriously 
afffected  by  the  bureaucratic  point  of  view,  and  even  where  they 
try  hard,  they  do  not  accomplish  much  for  labor.  Therefore, 
labor  becomes  disgusted  with  the  political  process,  and  labor 
men  do  not  welcome  the  prospect  of  being  managed  by  govern- 
ment. 

If  you  ask  such  men,  they  will  say:  "No;  the  politicians 
don't  know  anything  about  industry,  and  can't  learn.  The  peo- 
ple who  know  about  industry  are  those  who  work  in  it.  The 
true  way  to  run  an  industry  is  through  an  organization  of  the 
workers,  both  of  hand  and  brain.  The  true  way  to  run  the 
Steel  Trust  is  for  all  the  workers  in  it,  men  and  women,  high 
and  low,  to  be  recognized  by  law  as  citizens  of  that  industry ; 
each  shop  must  elect  its  own  delegates  to  run  that  shop,  and 
elect  a  delegate  to  a  central  parliament  of  the  industry,  and  this 
industry  in  turn  must  elect  delegates  to  a  great  parliament  or 
convention  of  all  the  delegates  of  all  the  industries.  In  such  a 
central  gathering  every  one  would  be  represented,  because  every 
person  would  be  a  producer  of  some  sort,  and  whether  he  was  a 
steel  worker  or  a  street  sweeper  or  a  newsboy,  he  would  have  a 
vote  at  the  place  where  he  earns  his  living,  and  would  have  a 
say  in  the  management  of  his  job.  The  great  central  parliament 
would  elect  an  executive  committee  and  a  president,  and  so  we 
should  have  a  government  of  the  workers,  by  the  workers,  for 
the  workers."  This  idea  is  known  as  Syndicalism,  derived  from 
the  French  word  "syndicat,"  meaning  a  labor  union.  Since  the 
Russian  revolution  it  has  come  to  be  known  as  soviet  govern- 
ment, "soviet"  being  the  Russian  word  for  trade  council. 

Now,  taking  these  two  ideas  of  Socialism  and  Syndicalism, 
it  is  evident  that  they  may  be  combined  in  various  ways,  and 
applied  in  varying  degrees.  It  is  perfectly  conceivable,  for  ex- 
ample, that  the  people  of  the  United  States  might  elect  a  presi- 
dent pledged  to  call  a  parliament  of  industry,  and  to  delegate  the 
control  of  industry  to  this  parliament.  He  might  delegate  the 
control  to  a  certain  extent,  and  provide  for  its  extension,  step  by 
step ;  so  our  society  might  move  into  Syndicalism  by  the  way  of 
Socialism.  You  have  only  to  put  your  mind  on  the  possibilities 
of  the  situation  to  realize  that  one  method  shades  into  the  other 
with  a  great  variety  of  stages. 


168  Love  and  Society 

Consider  next  the  stages  between  capitalism  and  Socialism. 
We  have  in  the  United  States  some  industries  which  are  purely 
capitalistic;  for  example,  the  Steel  Trust,  which  is  privately 
owned,  and  has  been  powerful  enough,  not  merely  to  suppress 
every  effort  of  its  workers  to  organize,  but  every  effort  of  the 
government  to  regulate  it.  On  the  other  hand,  the  United 
States  Postoffice  represents  State  Socialism ;  although  the  work- 
ers have  been  forbidden  to  organize,  and  the  management  of  the 
industry  is  so  arbitrary  that  I  have  always  preferred  to  call  it 
State  Capitalism.  Likewise  the  United  States  army  and  navy 
represent  State  Socialism.  When  we  had  the  job  of  putting  the 
Kaiser  out  of  business,  we  did  not  hire  Mr.  Rockefeller  to  do 
it ;  it  never  once  occurred  to  our  advocates  of  "individualism," 
of  "capitalist  enterprise  and  initiative,"  to  suggest  that  we 
should  hire  out  our  army  and  navy,  or  employ  the  Steel  Trust 
or  the  Powder  Trust  to  organize  its  own  army  and  navy  to  do 
the  fighting  for  us.  Likewise,  for  the  most  part,  we  run  the  job 
of  educating  our  children  by  the  method  of  municipal  Social- 
ism. We  run  our  libraries  in  the  same  way,  and  likewise  our 
job  of  fire  protection. 

It  is  interesting  to  note  how  in  every  country  the  line  be- 
tween capitalism  and  Socialism  is  drawn  in  a  different  place.  In 
America  we  run  practically  all  our  libraries  for  ourselves,  but  it 
would  seem  to  us  preposterous  to  think  of  running  our  theatres. 
In  Europe,  however,  they  have  state-owned  theatres,  which  set 
a  far  higher  standard  of  art  than  anything  we  know  at  home. 
Also,  they  have  state-owned  orchestras  and  opera-houses,  some- 
thing we  Americans  leave  to  the  subscriptions  of  millionaires. 
In  Europe  it  seems  perfectly  natural  to  the  poeple  that  the 
state  should  handle  their  telegrams  in  connection  with  the  post- 
office;  but  if  you  urge  government  ownership  of  the  telegraphs 
in  the  United  States,  they  tell  you  that  the  proposition  is  "social- 
istic," and  that  saves  the  need  of  thinking  about  it.  We  take 
it  for  granted  that  our  cities  could  run  the  libraries— even 
though  we  were  glad  when  Carnegie  came  along  and  saved  us 
the  need  of  appropriating  money  for  buildings.  Just  why  a  city 
should  be  able  to  run  a  library,  and  should  not  be  able  to  run  an 
opera-house,  or  a  newspaper,  is  something  which  has  never 
been  made  clear  to  me. 

Let  us  next  examine  the  stages  between  capitalism  and  Syn- 
dicalism. A  great  many  large  corporations  are  making  experi- 
ments in  what  they  call  "shop  management,"  allowing  the  work- 


The  Book  of  Society  169 

ers  membership  in  the  boards  of  directors  and  a  voice  in  the 
conditions  of  their  labor.  This  is  Syndicalism  so  far  as  it  goes. 
Likewise  it  is  Syndicalism  when  the  clothing  workers  and  the 
clothing  manufacturers  meet  together  and  agree  to  the  setting 
up  of  a  permanent  committee  to  work  out  a  set  of  rules  for  the 
conduct  of  the  industry,  and  to  fix  wages  from  time  to  time. 
Obviously,  these  things  are  capable  of  indefinite  extension,  and 
in  Europe  they  are  being  developed  far  more  rapidly.  For 
example,  in  Italy  the  agricultural  workers  are  organized,  and 
are  gradually  taking  possession  of  the  great  estates,  which  are 
owned  by  absentee  landlords.  They  wage  war  upon  these 
estates  by  means  of  sabotage  and  strikes,  and  then  they  buy  up 
the  estates  at  bargain  prices  and  develop  them  by  co-operative 
labor.  This  has  been  going  on  in  Italy  for  ten  years,  and  has 
become  the  most  significant  movement  in  the  country.  It  is  a 
triumph  of  pure  Syndicalism;  and  such  is  the  power  of  pure 
capitalism  in  the  United  States  that  the  American  people  have 
not  been  allowed  to  know  anything  about  this  change. 

Next,  what  are  the  stages  between  Socialism  and  Syndical- 
ism ?  These  also  are  infinite  in  number  and  variety.  As  a  mat- 
ter of  fact,  there  are  very  few  Socialists  who  advocate  State 
Socialism  without  any  admixture  of  Syndicalism.  The  regular 
formula  of  the  Socialist  party  is  "the  social  ownership  and  dem- 
ocratic control  of  the  instruments  and  means  of  production ;" 
and  what  the  phrase  "democratic  control"  means  is  simply  that 
you  introduce  into  your  Socialist  mixture  a  certain  flavoring  of 
Syndicalism,  greater  or  less,  according  to  your  temperament. 
In  the  same  way  there  are  many  Syndicalists  who  are  inclined 
toward  Socialism.  In  every  convention  of  radical  trade  union- 
ists, such  as,  for  example,  the  I.  W.  W.,  you  find  some  who 
favor  political  action,  and  these  will  have  the  same  point  of 
view  as  the  more  radical  members  of  the  Socialist  party,  who 
urge  a  program  of  industrial  as  well  as  political  action. 


CHAPTER  LXIV 

COMMUNISM  AND  ANARCHISM 

(Considers  the  idea  of  goods  owned  in  common,  and  the  idea 
of  a  society  without  compulsion,  and  how  these  ideas  have  fared 
in  Russia.) 

The  Russian  revolution  has  familiarized  us  with  the  word 
Communism.  In  the  beginning  of  the  revolutionary  movement 
Communism  denoted  what  we  now  call  Socialism ;  for  example, 
the  Communist  Manifesto  of  Marx  and  Engels  became  the  plat- 
form of  the  Social-democratic  parties.  But  because  most  of 
these  parties  supported  their  governments  during  the  war,  the 
more  radical  elements  have  now  rejected  the  word  SociaHsm, 
and  taken  up  the  old  word  Communism.  In  the  Russian  revo- 
lution the  Communists  went  so  far  as  to  seize  all  the  property 
of  the  rich,  and  so  the  word  Communism  has  come  to  bear 
something  of  its  early  Christian  significance. 

It  is  obvious  that  here,  too,  it  is  a  question  of  degree,  and 
Socialism  will  shade  into  Communism  by  an  infinite  variety  of 
stages,  depending  upon  what  forms  of  property  it  is  decided  to 
socialize.  The  Socialist  formula  commonly  accepted  is  that 
"goods  socially  used  shall  be  socially  owned,  and  goods  privately 
used  shall  be  privately  owned."  If  you  own  a  factory,  it  will 
be  taken  by  the  state,  or  by  the  workers,  and  made  social  prop- 
erty like  the  postoffice ;  but  no  Socialist  wants  to  socialize  your 
clothing,  or  your  books,  any  more  than  he  wants  to  socialize 
your  toothbrush. 

But  when  you  come  to  apply  this  formula,  you  run  quickly 
into  difficulties.  Suppose  you  are  a  millionaire,  and  own  a  pal- 
ace with  one  or  two  hundred  rooms,  and  a  hundred  servants. 
Do  you  use  that  socially,  or  do  you  use  it  privately  ?  And  sup- 
pose there  is  a  scarcity  of  houses,  and  thousands  of  children 
are  dying  of  tuberculosis  in  crowded  tenement  rooms?  You 
own  a  dozen  automobiles,  and  do  you  use  them  all  privately  ?  I 
point  out  to  you  that  in  time  of  emergency  the  capitalist  state 
does  not  hesitate  over  such  a  problem ;  it  seizes  your  palace  and 
turns  it  into  a  hospital,  it  takes  all  your  cars  and  uses  them  to 
carry  troops.  It  should  be  obvious  that  a  proletarian  state 
would  be  tempted  by  this  precedent. 

170 


The  Book  of  Society  171 

The  Communists  also  have  a  formula,  which  reads :  "From 
each  according  to  his  ability,  to  each  according  to  his  necessity." 
I  do  not  see  how  any  sensitive  person  can  deny  that  this  is  an 
extremely  fine  statement  of  an  ideal  in  social  life.  We  take  it 
quite  for  granted  in  family  life;  if  you  knew  a  family  in  which 
that  rule  did  not  apply,  you  would  consider  it  an  unloving  and 
uncivilized  family.  I  believe  that  when  once  industry  has  been 
socialized,  and  we  have  a  chance  to  see  what  production  can 
become,  we  shall  find  ourselves  quickly  adopting  that  family 
custom  as  our  law,  for  all  except  a  few  congenital  criminals  and 
cheats.  We  shall  find  that  we  can  produce  so  much  wealth  that 
it  is  not  worth  while  keeping  count  of  unimportant  items.  If 
today  you  meet  someone  on  the  street  and  ask  him  for  a  match 
or  a  pin,  you  do  not  think  of  offering  to  pay  him.  This  is  an 
automatic  consequence  of  the  cheapness  of  matches  and  pins. 
Once  upon  a  time  you  were  stopped  on  the  road  every  few  miles 
and  made  to  pay  a  few  cents  toll.  I  remember  seeing  toll-gates 
when  I  was  a  boy,  but  I  don't  think  I  have  seen  one  for  twenty 
years. 

In  exactly  the  same  way,  under  socialized  industry,  we  shall 
probably  make  street-car  traffic  free,  and  then  railroad  traffic ; 
we  shall  abolish  water  meters  and  gas  meters  and  electric  light 
meters,  also  telephone  charges,  except  perhaps  for  long  dis- 
tances, and  telegraph  tolls  for  personal  messages.  Then,  pres- 
ently, we  shall  find  ourselves  with  such  a  large  wheat  crop  that 
we  shall  make  bread  free;  and  then  music  and  theatres  and 
clothing  and  books.  At  present  we  use  furniture  and  clothing 
as  a  means  of  manifesting  our  economic  superiority  to  our  fel- 
lowmen.  One  of  the  most  charming  books  in  our  langfuage  is 
Veblen's  "Theory  of  the  Leisure  Class,"  in  which  these  proc- 
esses are  studied.  We  shall,  of  course,  have  to  raise  up  a  new 
generation,  unaccustomed  to  the  idea  of  class  and  of  class  dis- 
tinction, before  we  could  undertake  to  supply  people  with  all 
the  clothing  they  wanted  free  of  charge. 

The  Russian  theorists  made  haste  to  carry  out  these  ideas 
all  at  once ;  they  tried  to  leap  several  centuries  in  the  evolution 
of  Russian  society.  They  ordained  complete  Communism  in 
land;  but  the  peasants  would  have  nothing  to  do  with  such 
notions— each  wanted  his  own  land,  and  what  he  produced  on 
it.  The  Soviets  have  now  been  forced  to  give  way,  not  merely 
to  the  peasants,  but  to  the  traders ;  and  so  we  see  once  again  that 
it  is  better  to  take  one  step  forward  than  to  take  several  steps 


172  Love  and  Society 

forward  and  then  several  steps  backward.  The  Russian  revo- 
lution is  not  yet  completed,  so  no  one  can  say  how  many  steps 
backward  it  will  be  forced  to  take. 

This  revolution  was  an  interesting  combination  of  the  ideas 
of  Socialism  and  Syndicalism.  The  trade  unionists  seized  the 
factories,  and  made  an  effort  at  democratic  control  of  industry. 
At  the  same  time  the  state  was  overthrown  by  a  political  party, 
the  Bolsheviks,  who  set  up  a  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat. 
Because  of  civil  war  and  outside  invasion,  the  democratic  ele- 
ments in  the  experiment  Tiave  been  more  and  more  driven  into 
the  background,  and  the  authority  of  the  state  has  correspond- 
ingly increased.  This  causes  us  to  think  of  the  Soviet  system 
as  necessarily  opposed  to  democracy,  but  this  is  not  in  any  way 
a  necessary  thing.  There  is  no  inevitable  connection  between 
industrial  control  by  the  workers  and  a  dictatorship  over  the 
state.  In  Germany  the  state  is  proceeding  to  organize  a 
national  parliament  of  industry,  and  to  provide  for  management 
of  the  factories  by  the  labor  unions.  The  Italian  government 
has  promised  to  do  the  same  thing.  These,  of  course,  are  cap- 
italist governments,  and  they  will  keep  their  promises  only  as 
they  are  made  to;  but  it  is  a  perfectly  possible  thing  that  in 
either  of  these  countries  a  vote  of  the  people  might  change  the 
government,  and  put  in  authority  men  who  would  really  pro- 
ceed to  turn  industry  over  to  the  control  of  the  workers.  That 
would  be  the  Soviet  or  Syndicalist  system,  brought  about  by 
democratic  means,  without  dictatorship  or  civil  war. 

Another  group  of  revolutionary  thinkers  whose  theories 
must  be  mentioned  are  the  Anarchists.  The  word  Anarchy  is 
commonly  used  as  a  synonym  for  chaos  and  disorder,  which  it 
does  not  mean  at  all.  It  means  the  absence  of  authority ;  and  it 
is  characteristic  of  people's  view  of  life  that  they  are  unable  to 
conceive  of  there  being  such  a  thing  as  order,  unless  it  is  main- 
tained by  force.  The  theory  of  the  Anarchist  is  that  order  is  a 
necessity  of  the  human  spirit,  and  that  people  would  conform  to 
the  requirements  of  a  just  order  by  their  own  free  will  and 
without  external  compulsion.  The  Anarchist  believes  that  the 
state  is  an  instrument  of  class  oppression,  and  has  no  other 
reason  for  being.  He  wishes  the  industries  to  be  organized  by 
free  associations  of  the  people  who  work  in  them. 

Some  of  the  greatest  of  the  world's  moral  teachers  have 
been  Anarchists :  Jesus,  for  example,  and  Shelley  and  Thoreau 
and  Tolstoi,  and  in  our  time  Kropotkin.    These  men  voiced  the 


The  Book  of  Society  173 

highest  aspirations  of  the  human  spirit,  and  the  form  of  society 
which  they  dreamed  is  the  one  we  set  before  us  as  our  final 
goal.  But  the  world  does  not  leap  into  perfection  all  at  once, 
and  meantime  here  we  have  the  capitalist  system  and  the  cap- 
italist state,  and  what  attitude  shall  we  take  to  them  ?  There  are 
impassioned  idealists  who  refuse  to  make  any  terms  with  injus- 
tice, or  to  submit  to  compulsion,  and  these  preach  the  immediate 
destruction  of  capitalist  government,  and  capitalist  govern- 
ment responds  with  prison  and  torture,  and  so  we  have  some 
Anarchists  who  throw  bombs. 

There  are  those  who  call  themselves  "philosophic"  Anar- 
chists, wishing  to  indicate  thereby  that  they  preach  this  doctrine, 
but  do  not  attempt  to  carry  it  into  action  as  yet.  Some  among 
these  verge  toward  the  Communist  point  of  view,  and  call  them- 
selves Communist-anarchists;  such  was  Kropotkin,  whose 
theories  of  social  organization  you  will  find  in  his  book  "The 
Conquest  of  Bread."  There  are  others  who  call  themselves 
Syndicalist-anarchists,  finding  their  centers  of  free  association 
in  the  radical  labor  unions. 

After  the  Russian  revolution,  the  Anarchists  found  them- 
selves in  a  dilemma,  and  their  groups  were  torn  apart  like  every 
other  party  and  class  in  Russia.  Here  was  a  new  form  of  state 
set  up  in  society,  a  workers*  state,  and  what  attitude  should  the 
Anarchists  take  toward  that?  Many  of  them  stood  out  for 
their  principles,  and  resisted  the  Bolshevik  state,  and  put  the 
Bolsheviks  under  the  embarrassing  necessity  of  throwing  them 
into  jail.  We  good  orthodox  Americans,  who  are  accustomed 
to  dump  Socialists  and  Communists  and  Syndicalists  and 
Anarchists  all  together  into  one  common  kettle,  took  Emma 
Goldman  and  Alexander  Berkman  and  shipped  them  over  to 
Russia,  where  we  thought  they  belonged.  Now  our  capitalist 
newspapers  find  it  strange  that  these  Anarchists  do  not  like  the 
Russian  government  any  better  than  they  like  the  American 
government ! 

On  the  other  hand,  a  great  many  Anarchists  have  suddenly 
found  themselves  compelled  by  the  Russian  situation  to  face  the 
facts  of  life.  They  have  decided  that  a  government  is  not  such 
a  bad  thing  after  all — when  it  is  your  own  government  I  Robert 
Minor,  for  example,  has  recanted  his  Anarchist  position,  and 
joined  the  Communists  in  advocating  the  dropping  of  all  dif- 
ferences among  the  workers,  all  theories  as  to  the  future,  and 
concentrating  upon  the  immediate  task  of  overthrowing  cap- 


174  Love  and  Society 

italist  government  and  keeping  it  overthrown.  In  every  civil- 
ized nation  the  Russian  revolution  has  had  this  effect  upon  the 
extreme  revolutionists.  It  has  given  them  a  definite  aim  and  a 
definite  program  upon  which  they  can  unite ;  it  has  presented  to- 
capitalist  government  the  answer  of  force  to  force;  it  has 
shown  the  masters  of  industry  in  precise  and  definite  form 
what  they  have  to  face — unless  they  set  themselves  immediately 
and  in  good  faith  to  the  task  of  establishing  real  democracy  in 
industry. 


CHAPTER  LXV 
SOCIAL  REVOLUTION 

(How  the  great  change  is  coming  in  different  industries,  and 
how  we  may  prepare  to  meet  it.) 

From  a  study  of  the  world's  political  revolutions  we  observe 
that  a  variety  of  governmental  forms  develop,  and  that  different 
circumstances  in  each  country  produce  different  institutions. 
Suppose  that  back  in  the  days  of  the  French  monarchy  some 
one  asked  you  how  France  was  going  to  be  governed  as  a  politi- 
cal republic;  how  would  elections  be  held,  what  would  be  the 
powers  of  the  deputies,  who  would  choose  the  premier,  who 
would  choose  the  president,  what  would  be  the  duties  of  each  ? 
Who  can  explain  why  in  France  and  England  the  executive  is 
responsible  to  the  parliament  and  must  answer  its  questions, 
■while  in  the  United  States  the  executive  is  an  autocrat,  respon- 
sible to  no  one  for  four  years?  Who  could  have  foreseen  that 
in  England,  supposed  to  remain  a  monarchy,  the  constitution 
would  be  fluid ;  while  in  America,  supposed  to  be  a  democracy, 
the  constitution  would  be  rigid,  and  the  supreme  power  of 
rejecting  changes  in  the  laws  would  be  vested  in  a  group  of 
reactionary  lawyers  appointed  for  life  ?  There  will  be  similar 
surprises  in  the  social  revolution,  and  similar  diflFerences 
between  what  things  pretend  to  be  and  what  they  are. 

I  used  to  compare  the  social  revolution  to  the  hatching  of  an 
egg.  You  examine  it,  and  apparently  it  is  all  egg ;  but  then  sud- 
denly something  begins  to  happen,  and  in  a  few  minutes  it  is  all 
chicken.  If,  however,  you  investigate,  you  discover  that  the 
chicken  had  been  forming  inside  the  egg  for  some  time.  I 
know  that  there  is  a  chicken  now  forming  inside  our  social  egg ; 
but  having  realized  the  complexity  of  social  phenomena,  I  no 
longer  venture  to  predict  the  exact  time  of  the  hatching,  or  the 
size  and  color  of  the  chicken. 

Perhaps  it  is  more  useful  to  compare  the  social  revolution 
to  a  child-birth.  A  good  surgeon  knows  what  is  due  to  happen, 
but  he  knows  also  that  there  are  a  thousand  uncertainties,  a 
thousand  dangerous  possibilities,  and  all  he  can  do  is  to  watch 
the  process  and  be  prepared  to  meet  each  emergency  as  it  arises. 

175 


i76  Love  and  Society 

The  birth  process  consists  of  one  pang  after  another,  but  no  one 
can  say  which  pang  will  complete  the  birth,  or  whether  it  will  be 
completed  at  all.  Karl  Marx  is  author  of  the  saying  that  "force 
is  the  midwife  of  progress,"  so  you  may  see  that  I  am  not  the 
inventor  of  this  simile  of  child-birth. 

There  are  three  factors  in  the  social  revolution,  each  of  which 
will  vary  in  each  country,  and  in  different  parts  of  the  country, 
and  at  different  periods.  First,  there  is  the  industrial  condition 
of  the  country,  a  complex  set  of  economic  factors.  The  indus- 
trial life  of  England  depends  primarily  on  shipping  and  coal. 
In  the  United  States  shipping  is  of  less  importance,  and  rail- 
roads take  the  place.  In  the  United  States  the  eastern  portion 
lives  mainly  by  manufacture,  the  western  by  agriculture,  while 
the  south  is  held  a  generation  behind  by  a  race  problem.  In 
France  the  great  estates  were  broken  up,  and  agriculture  fell 
into  the  hands  of  peasant  proprietors,  who  are  the  main  support 
of  French  capitalism.  In  Prussia  the  great  estates  were  held 
intact,  and  remained  the  basis  of  a  feudal  aristocracy.  In 
America  land  changes  hands  freely,  and  therefore  one-third  of 
our  farms  are  mortgaged,  and  another  third  are  worked  by  ten- 
ants. In  Russia  there  was  practically  no  middle  class,  while  in 
the  United  States  there  is  practically  nothing  but  middle  class ; 
the  rich  have  been  rich  for  such  a  short  while  that  they  still 
look  middle  class  and  act  middle  class,  in  spite  of  all  their 
efforts,  while  the  working  class  hopes  to  be  middle  class  and  is 
persuaded  that  it  can  become  middle  class.  Such  varying  fac- 
tors produce  in  each  country  a  different  problem,  and  make 
inevitable  a  different  process  of  change. 

The  second  factor  is  the  condition  of  organization  and  edu- 
cation of  the  workers.  This  likewise  varies  in  every  country, 
and  in  every  part  of  every  country.  There  is  a  continual  strug- 
gle on  the  part  of  the  workers  to  organize  and  educate  them- 
selves, and  a  continual  effort  on  the  part  of  the  ruling  class  to 
prevent  this.  In  some  industries  in  America  you  find  the  work- 
ers one  hundred  per  cent  organized,  and  in  other  industries  you 
find  them  not  organized  at  all.  It  is  obvious  that  in  the  former 
case  the  social  change,  when  it  comes,  will  be  comparatively 
simple,  involving  little  bloodshed  and  waste ;  in  the  latter  case 
there  will  be  social  convulsions,  rioting  and  destruction  of  prop- 
erty, disorganization  of  industry  and  widespread  distress. 

The  third  factor  is  the  state  of  mind  of  the  propertied 
classes,  the  amount  of  resistance  they  are  willing  to  make  to 


The  Book  of  Society  177 

social  change.  I  have  done  a  great  deal  of  pleading  with  the 
masters  of  industry  in  my  country;  I  have  written  appeals  to 
Vincent  Astor  and  John  D.  Rockefeller,  to  capitalist  news- 
papers and  judges  and  congressmen  and  presidents.  I  have 
been  told  that  this  is  a  waste  of  my  time ;  that  these  people  can- 
not learn  and  will  not  learn,  and  that  it  is  foolish  to  appeal 
either  to  their  hearts  or  their  understanding.  But  I  perceive  that 
the  class  struggle  is  like  a  fraction;  it  has  a  numerator  and  a 
denominator,  and  you  can  increase  the  fraction  just  as  well  by 
decreasing  the  denominator  as  by  increasing  the  numerator. 
To  vary  the  simile,  here  are  two  groups  of  men  engaged  in  a 
tug  of  war,  and  you  can  affect  the  result  just  as  decisively  by 
persuading  one  group  to  pull  less  hard,  as  by  persuading  the 
other  group  to  pull  harder. 

Picture  to  yourself  two  factories.  In  factory  number  one 
the  owner  is  a  hard-driving  business  man,  an  active  spirit  in  the 
so-called  "open-shop"  campaign.  He  believes  in  his  divine  right 
to  manage  industry,  and  he  believes  also  in  the  gospel  of  "all 
that  the  traffic  will  bear."  He  prevents  his  men  from  organiz- 
ing, and  employs  spies  to  weed  out  the  radicals  and  to  sow  dis- 
sensions. When  a  strike  comes,  he  calls  in  the  police  and  the 
strike-breaking  agencies,  and  in  every  possible  way  he  makes 
himself  hated  and  feared  by  his  workers.  Then  some  day 
comes  the  unemployment  crisis,  and  a  wave  of  revolt  sweeping 
over  the  country.  The  workers  seize  that  factory  and  set  up  a 
dictatorship  of  the  proletariat  and  a  "red  terror."  If  the  owner 
resists,  they  kill  him ;  in  any  case,  they  wipe  out  his  interest  in 
the  business,  and  do  everything  possible  to  destroy  his  power 
over  it,  even  to  his  very  name.  They  run  the  business  by  a  shop 
committee,  and  you  have  for  that  particular  factory  a  Syndical- 
ist, or  even  Anarchist  form  of  social  reconstruction. 

Now  for  factory  number  two,  whose  owner  is  a  humane  and 
enlightened  man,  studying  social  questions  and  realizing  his 
responsibility,  and  the  temporary  nature  of  his  stewardship. 
He  gives  his  people  the  best  possible  working  conditions,  he 
keeps  open  books  and  discusses  wages  and  profits  with  them, 
he  educates  the  young  workers,  he  meets  with  their  union  com- 
mittees on  a  basis  of  free  discussion.  When  the  unemployment 
crisis  comes  and  the  wave  of  revolt  sweeps  the  country,  this 
man  and  his  workers  understand  one  another.  He  says :  "I  can 
no  longer  pay  profits,  and  so  I  can  no  longer  keep  going  under 
the  profit  system ;  but  if  you  are  ready  to  run  the  plant,  I  am 


178  Love  and  Society 

ready  to  help  you  the  best  I  can."  Manifestly,  this  man  will 
continue  the  president  of  the  corporation,  and  if  he  trains 
his  sons  wisely,  they  will  keep  his  place ;  so,  instead  of  having 
in  that  factory  a  dictatorship  and  a  terror,  you  will  have  a 
constitutional  monarchy,  gradually  evolving  into  a  democratic 
republic. 


CHAPTER  LXVI 
CONFISCATION   OR  COMPENSATION 

(Shall  the  workers  buy  out  the  capitalists?  Can  they  afford 
to  do  it,  and  what  will  be  the  price?) 

The  problem  of  whether  the  social  revolution  shall  be  vio- 
lent or  peaceable  depends  in  great  part  upon  our  answer  to  the 
question  of  confiscation  versus  compensation.  We  are  now 
going  to  consider,  first,  the  abstract  rights  and  wrongs  of  the 
question,  and,  second,  the  practical  aspects  of  it. 

There  is  a  story  very  popular  among  single  taxers  and  other 
advocates  of  freedom  of  the  land.  An  English  land-owner  met 
a  stranger  walking  on  his  estate,  and  rebuked  him  for  trespass- 
ing. Said  the  stranger,  "You  own  this  land  ?"  Said  the  other, 
"I  do."  "And  how  did  you  get  it  ?"  "I  inherited  it  from  my 
father."  "And  how  did  your  father  get  it  ?"  "He  inherited  it 
from  his  father."  So  on  for  half  a  dozen  more  ancestors,  until 
at  last  the  Englishman  answered,  "He  fought  for  it."  Where- 
upon the  stranger  took  off  his  coat  and  rolled  up  his  sleeves  and 
said,  "I'll  fight  you  for  it." 

This  is  all  there  is  to  say  on  the  subject  of  the  abstract  rights 
of  land  titles.  There  is  no  title  to  land  which  is  valid  on  a  his- 
torical basis.  Everything  rests  upon  fraud  and  force,  continued 
through  endless  ages  of  human  history.  We  in  the  United 
States  took  most  of  our  land  from  the  Indians,  and  in  the 
process  our  guiding  rule  was  that  the  only  good  Injun  was  a 
dead  Injun.  We  first  helped  the  English  kings  to  take  large 
sections  of  our  country  from  the  French  and  Spanish,  and  then 
we  took  them  from  the  English  king  by  a  violent  revolution. 
We  purchased  our  Southwestern  states  from  Mexico,  but  not 
until  we  had  taken  the  precaution  of  killing  some  thousands  of 
Mexicans  in  war,  which  had  the  effect  of  keeping  down  the 
purchase  price.  It  would  be  a  simple  matter  to  show  that  all 
public  franchises  are  similarly  tainted  with  fraud.  Proudhon 
laid  down  the  principle  that  "property  is  theft,"  and  from  this 
principle  it  is  an  obvious  conclusion  that  society  has  the  right 
to  scrap  all  paper  titles  to  wealth,  and  to  start  the  world's  indus- 
tries over  again  on  the  basis  of  share  and  share  alike. 

179 


180  Love  and  Society 

But  stop  and  consider  for  a  moment.  "Property  is  theft/' 
you  say.  But  go  to  your  corner  grocery,  and  tell  the  grocer  that 
you  deny  his  title  to  the  sack  of  prunes  which  he  exhibits  in 
front  of  his  counter.  He  will  tell  you  that  he  has  paid  for  them ; 
but  you  answer  that  the  prunes  were  raised  on  stolen  land,  and 
shipped  to  him  over  a  railroad  whose  franchise  was  obtained  by 
bribery.  Will  that  convince  the  grocer  ?  It  will  not.  Neither 
will  it  convince  the  policeman  or  the  judge,  nor  will  it  convince 
the  voters  of  the  country.  Most  people  have  a  deeply  rooted 
conviction  that  there  are  rights  to  property  now  definitely  estab- 
lished and  made  valid  by  law.  If  you  have  paid  taxes  on  land 
for  a  certain  period,  the  land  "belongs"  to  you ;  and  I  am  sure 
you  might  agitate  from  now  to  kingdom  come  without  persuad- 
ing the  American  people  that  New  Mexico  ought  to  be  returned 
to  Mexico,  or  the  western  prairies  to  the  Indian  tribes. 

Such  are  the  facts ;  now  let  us  apply  them  to  the  right  of 
exploitation,  embodied  in  the  ownership  of  a  certain  number  of 
bonds  or  shares  of  stock  in  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation. 
"Pass  a  law,"  says  the  Socialist,  "providing  for  the  taking  over 
of  United  States  Steel  by  the  government."  At  once  to  every 
owner  comes  one  single  thought — are  you  going  to  buy  this 
stock,  or  are  you  going  to  confiscate  it?  If  you  attempt  con- 
fiscation, the  courts  will  declare  the  law  unconstitutional;  and 
you  either  have  to  defy  the  courts,  which  is  revolutionary 
action,  or  to  amend  the  constitution.  If  you  adopt  the  latter 
course,  you  have  before  you  a  long  period  of  agitation;  you 
have  to  carry  both  houses  of  Congress  by  a  two-thirds  major- 
ity, and  the  legislatures  of  three-fourths  of  the  States.  You 
have  to  do  this  in  the  face  of  the  most  bitter  and  infuriated 
opposition  of  those  who  are  defending  what  they  regard  as  their 
rights.  You  have  to  meet  the  arguments  of  the  entire  cap- 
italist press  of  the  country,  and  you  have  the  certainty  of 
widespread  bribery  of  your  elected  officials. 

The  prospect  of  doing  all  this  under  the  forms  of  law  seems 
extremely  discouraging ;  so  come  the  Syndicalists,  saying,  "Let 
us  seize  the  factories,  and  stop  the  exploitation  at  the  point  of 
production."  So  come  the  Communists,  saying,  "Let  us  over- 
throw capitalist  government,  and  break  the  net  of  bourgeois 
legality,  and  establish  a  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat,  which 
will  put  an  end  to  privilege  and  class  domination  all  at  once." 
What  are  we  to  say  to  these  different  programs? 

Suppose  we  buy  out  the  stockholders  of  United  States  Steel, 


The  Book  of  Society  181 

and  issue  to  them  government  bonds,  what  have  we  accom- 
plished ?  Nothing,  say  the  advocates  of  confiscation ;  we  have 
changed  the  form  of  exploitation,  but  the  substance  of  it 
remains  the  same.  The  stockholders  get  their  money  from  the 
United  States  government,  instead  of  from  the  United  States 
Steel  Corporation;  but  they  get  their  money  just  the  same — the 
product,  not  of  their  labor,  but  of  the  labor  of  the  steel  workers. 
Suppose  we  carried  out  the  same  procedure  all  along  the  line ; 
suppose  the  government  took  over  all  industries,  and  paid  for 
their  securities  with  government  bonds.  Then  we  should  have 
capitalism  administered  by  a  capitalist  government,  instead  of 
by  our  present  masters  of  industry;  we  should  have  a  state 
capitalism,  instead  of  a  private  capitalism;  we  should  have  the 
government  buying  and  selling  products,  and  exploiting  labor, 
and  paying  over  the  profits  to  an  hereditary  privileged  class. 
The  capitalist  system  would  go  on  just  the  same,  except  that 
labor  would  have  one  all-powerful  tyrant,  instead  of  many 
lesser  tyrants,  as  at  present. 

So  argue  the  advocates  of  confiscation.  And  the  advocates 
of  purchase  reply  that  in  buying  the  securities  of  United  States 
Steel,  we  should  fix  the  purchase  price  at  the  present  market 
value  of  the  property,  and  that  price,  once  fixed,  would  be  per- 
manent; all  future  unearned  increment  of  the  steel  industry 
would  belong  to  the  government  instead  of  to  private  owners. 
Consider,  for  example,  what  happened  during  the  world  war. 
When  I  was  a  boy,  soon  after  the  Steel  Trust  was  launched,  its 
stock  was  down  to  something  like  six  dollars,  and  I  knew  small 
investors  who  lost  every  dollar  they  had  put  in.  But  during  the 
war,  steel  stock  soared  to  a  hundred  and  thirty-six  dollars  per 
share ;  it  paid  dividends  of  some  thirty  per  cent  per  year,  and 
accumulated  enormous  surpluses  besides. 

The  same  thing  was  true  of  practically  all  the  big  corpora- 
tions. According  to  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  McAdoo,  there 
were  coal  companies  which  paid  as  high  as  eight  hundred  per 
cent  per  year ;  that  is  to  say,  the  profits  in  one  year  were  eight 
times  the  total  investment.  Assuming  that  our  government 
bonds  paid  five  per  cent,  it  appears  that  the  owners  of  these  coal 
companies  got  one  hundred  and  sixty  times  as  much  under  our 
present  private  property  system  as  they  would  have  got  under 
a  system  of  state  purchase.  Even  completely  dominated  by  cap- 
italism as  our  courts  are  today,  they  would  not  dare  require  us 
to  pay  for  industries  more  than  six  per  cent  on  the  market  value 

13 


182  Love  and  Society 

of  the  investment;  and  from  what  I  know  of  the  inside  graft 
of  American  big  business  that  would  be  restricting  the  private 
owners  to  less  than  one-fourth  of  what  they  are  getting  at 
present. 

We  have  already  pointed  out  the  economies  that  can  be 
made  by  putting  industry  under  a  uniform  system.  But  all 
these,  important  as  they  are,  amount  to  little  in  comparison  with 
the  one  great  consideration,  which  is  that  by  purchasing  large 
scale  industry,  we  should  break  the  "iron  ring";  we  should 
thenceforth  be  able  to  do  our  manufacturing  for  use  instead  of 
for  profit,  and  so  we  should  put  an  end  to  unemployment.  Our 
cheerful  workers  would  throng  into  the  factories,  to  produce 
for  themselves  instead  of  for  masters ;  and  in  one  year  of  that 
we  should  so  change  the  face  of  our  country  that  a  return  to  the 
system  of  private  ownership  would  be  unthinkable.  In  one  year 
we  could  raise  production  to  such  a  point  that  the  interest  on 
the  bonds  we  had  issued  would  be  like  the  crumbs  left  over 
from  a  feast. 


% 


CHAPTER  LXVII 

EXPROPRIATING  THE  EXPROPRIATORS 

(Discusses  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat,  and  its  chances 
for  success  in  the  United  States.) 

I  am  aware  that  the  suggestion  of  paying  for  the  industries 
we  socialize  will  sound  tame  and  uninspiring  to  a  lot  of  ardent 
young  radicals  of  my  acquaintance.  They  will  shake  their 
heads  sadly  and  say  that  I  am  getting  middle-aged  and  tired. 
We  have  seen  in  Russia  and  Hungary  and  other  places,  so  many 
illustrations  of  the  quick  and  easy  way  to  expropriate  the 
expropriators  that  now  there  is  in  every  country  a  considerable 
group  of  radicals  who  will  hear  to  no  program  less  picturesque 
than  barricades  and  councils  of  action. 

In  considering  this  question,  I  set  aside  all  considerations  of 
abstract  right  or  wrong,  the  justification  for  violence  in  the 
overthrow  of  capitalist  society.  I  put  the  question  on  the  basis 
of  cash,  pure  and  simple.  It  will  cost  a  certain  amount  of 
money  to  buy  out  the  owners,  and  that  money  will  have  to  be 
paid,  as  it  is  paid  at  present,  out  of  the  labor  of  the  useful 
workers.  The  workers  don't  want  to  pay  any  more  than  they 
have  to;  the  question  they  must  consider  is,  which  way  will 
they  have  to  pay  most.  The  advocates  of  the  dictatorship  of 
the  proletariat  are  lured  by  the  delightful  prospect  of  not  hav- 
ing to  pay  anything;  and  if  that  were  really  possible  it  would 
undoubtedly  be  the  better  way.  But  we  have  to  consider  this 
question :  Is  the  program  of  not  having  to  pay  anything  a  reality, 
or  is  it  only  a  dream?  Suppose  it  should  turn  out  that  we 
have  to  pay  anyhow,  and  that  in  the  case  of  violent  revolution 
we  pay  much  more,  and  in  addition  run  serious  risk  of  not 
getting  what  we  pay  for? 

Here  are  enormous  industries,  running  at  full  blast,  and  it 
is  proposed  that  some  morning  the  workers  shall  rise  up  and 
seize  them,  and  turn  out  the  owners  and  managers,  and  run  the 
industries  themselves.  Will  anybody  maintain  that  this  can  be 
done  without  stopping  production  in  those  factories  for  a  single 
day  ?    Certainly  production  must  stop  during  the  time  you  are 

183 


184  Love  and  Society 

fighting  for  possession;  and  the  cruel  experience  of  Russia 
proves  that  it  will  stop  during  the  further  time  you  are  fighting 
to  keep  possession,  and  to  put  down  counter-revolutionary  con- 
spiracies. Also,  alas,  it  will  stop  during  the  time  you  are  look- 
ing for  somebody  who  knows  how  to  run  that  industry ;  it  will 
stop  during  the  time  you  are  organizing  your  new  administra- 
tive staff.  You  may  discover  to  your  consternation  that  it 
stops  during  the  time  you  are  arranging  to  get  other  industries 
to  give  you  credit,  and  to  ship  you  raw  materials ;  also  during 
the  time  you  are  finding  the  workers  in  other  industries  who 
want  your  product,  and  are  able  to  pay  for  it  with  something 
that  you  can  use,  or  that  you  can  sell  in  a  badly  disorganized 
market. 

And  all  the  time  that  you  are  arranging  these  things,  you 
are  going  to  have  the  workers  at  your  back,  not  getting  any  pay, 
or  being  paid  with  your  paper  money  which  they  distrust,  and 
growling  and  grumbling  at  you  because  you  are  not  running 
things  as  you  promised.  You  see,  the  mass  of  the  workers  are 
not  going  to  understand,  because  you  haven't  made  them  under- 
stand ;  you  have  brought  about  the  great  change  by  your  pro- 
gram of  a  dictatorship,  of  action  by  an  "enlightened  minority"; 
and  now  you  have  the  terror  that  the  unenlightened  majority 
may  be  won  back  by  their  capitalist  masters,  and  may  kick  you 
out  of  control,  or  even  stand  you  up  against  a  wall  and  shoot  you 
by  a  firing  squad.  And  all  the  time  you  are  worrying  over  these 
problems,  who  can  estimate  the  total  amount  the  factory  might 
have  been  producing  if  it  had  been  running  at  full  blast? 
Whatever  that  difference  is,  remember,  it  is  paid  by  the  work- 
ers; and  might  that  sum  not  just  as  well  have  been  used  to  buy 
out  the  owners? 

If  we  were  back  in  the  old  days  of  hand  labor  and  crude, 
unorganized  production,  I  admit  that  the  only  way  to  benefit 
the  slaves  might  be  to  turn  out  the  masters  by  force.  But  here 
we  have  a  social  system  of  infinite  complexity,  a  delicate  and 
sensitive  machine,  which  no  one  person  in  the  world,  and  no 
group  of  persons  understands  thoroughly.  In  the  running  of 
such  a  machine  a  slight  blunder  may  cost  a  fortune ;  and  cer- 
tainly all  the  skill,  all  the  training,  all  the  loyal  services  of  our 
expert  engineers  and  managers  is  needed  if  we  are  to  remodel 
that  machine  while  keeping  it  running.  The  amount  of  wealth 
which  we  could  save  by  the  achieving  of  that  feat  would  be 
sufficient  to  maintain  a  class  of  owners  in  idleness  and  luxury 


The  Book  of  Society  185 

for  a  generation ;  and  so  I  say,  with  all  the  energy  and  convic- 
tion I  possess,  pay  them!  Pay  them  anything  that  is  necessary, 
in  order  to  avoid  civil  war  and  social  disorganization!  Pay 
them  so  much  that  they  can  have  no  possible  cause  of  complaint, 
that  the  most  hide-bound  capitalistic-minded  judge  in  the  coun- 
try cannot  find  a  legal  flaw  in  the  bargain !  Pay  them  so  that 
every  engineer  and  efficiency  expert  and  manager  and  foreman 
and  stenographer  and  office-boy  will  stay  on  the  job  and  work 
double  time  to  put  the  enterprise  through!  Pay  them  such  a 
price  that  even  Judge  Gary  and  John  D.  Rockefeller  will  be 
willing  to  help  us  do  the  job  of  social  readjustment ! 

"Ah,  yes,"  my  young  radical  friends  will  say,  "that  sounds 
all  very  beautiful,  but  it's  the  old  Utopian  dream  of  brother- 
hood and  class  co-operation.  That  will  never  happen  on  this 
"earth,  until  you  have  first  abolished  capitalism."  My  answer  is, 
it  could  happen  tomorrow  if  we  had  sufficient  intelligence  to 
make  it  happen.  That  it  does  not  happen  is  simply  absence  of 
intelligence.  And  will  anyone  maintain  that  it  is  the  part  of  an 
intelligent  man  to  advocate  a  less  intelligent  course  than  he 
knows  ?  What  is  the  use  of  our  intelligence,  if  we  abdicate  its 
authority,  and  give  ourselves  up  to  programs  of  action  which 
we  know  are  blind  and  destructive  and  wasteful  ?  We  may  see 
a  great  vessel  going  on  the  rocks ;  we  may  feel  certain  that  it  is 
going,  in  spite  of  everything  we  can  do ;  but  shall  we  fail  to  do 
what  we  can  to  make  those  in  the  vessel  realize  how  they  might 
get  safely  into  the  harbor? 

We  have  had  the  Russian  revolution  before  us  for  four 
years.  Mankind  will  spend  the  next  hundred  years  in  studying 
it,  and  still  have  much  to  learn,  but  the  broad  outlines  of  the 
great  experiment  are  now  plain  before  our  eyes.  Russia  was  a 
backward  country,  and  she  tried  to  fight  a  modern  war,  and  it 
broke  her  down.  She  had  practically  no  middle  class,  and  her 
ruling  class  was  rotten,  and  so  the  revolutionists  had  their 
chance,  and  they  seized  it.  Perhaps  it  would  be  more  correct 
to  say  that  they  came  to  the  rescue  of  Russia,  saving  her  from 
the  hands  of  those  who  were  trying  to  force  her  to  fight,  when 
she  was  utterly  exhausted  and  incapable  of  fighting. 

Anyhow,  here  was  your  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat.  It 
turned  out  all  the  executive  experts,  or  nearly  all  of  them, 
because  they  were  tainted  with  the  capitalist  psychology;  and 
then  straightway  it  had  to  call  them  back  and  make  terms  with 
them,  because  industry  could  not  be  run  without  them.    And  of 


186  Love  and  Society 

course  these  engineers  and  managers  sabotaged  the  revolution — 
every  non-proletarian  sabotaged  it,  both  inside  Russia  and  out- 
side. You  denounced  this,  and  protested  against  this,  but  all 
the  same  it  happened;  it  was  human  nature  that  it  should 
happen,  and  it  is  one  of  the  things  you  have  to  count  on,  in 
any  and  every  country  where  you  attempt  the  social  revolution 
by  minority  action. 

They  have  got  power  in  Russia,  and  they  dream  of  getting 
power  in  America  in  the  same  way.  But  there  is  no  such  dis- 
organization in  our  country  as  there  was  in  Russia,  and  it 
would  take  a  generation  of  civil  strife  to  bring  us  to  such  a  con- 
dition. We  have  a  middle  class,  powerful,  thoroughly  organ- 
ized, and  thoroughly  conscious.  Moreover,  this  class  has  ideals 
of  majority  rule,  which  are  bred  in  its  very  bones ;  and  while 
they  have  never  realized  these  ideals,  they  think  they  have,  and 
they  are  prepared  to  fight  to  the  last  gasp  in  that  belief.  All 
that  the  leaders  of  Moscow  have  to  do  is  to  bring  about  an 
attempt  at  forcible  revolution,  and  they  will  discover  in  Ameri- 
can society  sufficient  power  of  organization  and  of  brutal  action 
to  put  their  movement  out  of  business  for  a  generation. 

A  hundred  years  ago  we  had  chattel  slavery  firmly  fixed  as 
the  industrial  system  of  one-half  of  these  United  States.  To 
far-seeing  statesmen  it  was  manifest  that  chattel  slavery  was  a 
wasteful  system,  and  that  it  could  not  exist  in  competition  with 
free  labor.  There  was  a  great  American,  Henry  Clay,  who 
came  forward  with  a  proposition  that  the  people  of  the  United 
States,  through  their,  government,  should  raise  the  money, 
about  a  billion  dollars,  and  compensate  the  owners  of  all  the 
slaves  and  set  them  free.  For  most  of  his  lifetime  Henry  Clay 
pleaded  for  that  plan.  But  the  masters  of  the  South  were 
making  money  fast ;  they  knew  how  to  handle  the  negro  as  a 
slave,  they  could  not  imagine  handling  him  as  a  free  laborer, 
and  they  would  not  hear  to  the  plan.  On  the  other  side  of 
Mason  and  Dixon's  line  were  fanatical  men  of  "principle,"  who 
said  that  slavery  was  wrong,  and  that  was  the  end  of  it.  There 
is  a  stanza  by  Emerson  discussing  this  question  of  confiscation 
versus  compensation : 

Pay  ransom  to  the  owner 

And  fill  the  bag  to  the  brim. 
Who  is  the  owner?     The  slave  is  owner, 

And  ever  was.     Pay  him. 


The  Book  of  Society  187 

This,  you  see,  is  magnificent  utterance,  but  as  economic 
philosophy  it  is  reckless  and  unsound.  The  abolitionists  of  the 
North  took  up  this  poem,  and  the  slave  power  of  the  South 
answered  with  a  battle-song : 

War  to  the  hilt. 

Theirs  be  the  guilt, 

Who  fetter  the  freeman  to  ransom  the  slave! 

And  so  the  issue  had  to  be  fought  out.  It  cost  a  million 
human  lives  and  five  billions  of  treasure,  and  it  set  American 
civilization  back  a  generation.  And  now  we  confront  exactly 
the  same  kind  of  emergency,  and  are  coming  to  exactly  the  same 
method  of  solution.  We  have  white  wage-slaves  clamoring  for 
their  freedom,  and  we  have  business  men  making  money  out  of 
them,  and  exercising  power  over  them,  and  finding  it  convenient 
and  pleasant.  They  are  going  to  fight  it  out  in  a  civil  war, 
and  which  side  is  going  to  win  I  am  not  sure.  But  when  the 
historians  come  to  write  about  it  a  couple  of  generations  from 
now,  let  them  be  able  to  record  that  there  were  a  few  men  in 
the  country  who  pleaded  for  a  sane  and  orderly  and  human 
solution  of  the  problem,  and  who  continued  to  voice  their  con- 
victions even  in  the  midst  of  the  cruel  and  wasteful  strife ! 


CHAPTER  LXVIII 
THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  LAND 

(Discusses  the  land  values  tax  as  a  means  of  social  readjust- 
ment, and  compares  it  with  other  programs.) 

The  writer  of  this  book  has  been  watching  the  social  process 
■for  twenty  years,  trying  to  figure  out  one  thing — how  the 
change  from  competition  to  co-operation  can  be  brought  about 
with  the  minimum  of  human  waste.  He  has  come  to  realize 
that  the  first  step  is  a  mental  one;  to  get  the  people  to 
want  the  change.  That  means  that  the  program  must  be  sim- 
ple, so  that  the  masses  can  understand  it.  As  a  social  engineer 
you  might  work  out  a  perfect  plan,  but  find  yourself  helpless, 
because  it  was  hard  to  explain.  As  illustration  of  what  I  mean, 
I  cite  the  single  tax,  a  theory  which  has  a  considerable  hold  in 
America,  but  which  politically  has  been  utterly  ineflfective. 

A  few  years  ago  a  devoted  enthusiast  in  Southern  Califor- 
nia, Luke  North,  started  what  he  called  the  "Great  Adventure** 
to  set  free  the  idle  land.  In  the  campaign  of  1918  I  gave  my 
help  to  this  movement,  and  when  it  failed  I  went  back  and  took 
stock,  and  revised  my  conclusions  concerning  the  single  tax. 
Theoretically  the  movement  has  a  considerable  percentage  of 
right  on  its  side.  Land,  in  the  sense  that  single  taxers  use  it, 
meaning  all  the  natural  sources  of  wealth,  is  certainly  an  impor- 
tant basis  of  exploitation,  and  if  you  were  to  tax  land  values  to 
the  full  extent,  you  would  abolish  a  large  portion  of  privilege — 
just  how  large  would  be  hard  to  figure.  I  was  perfectly  willing 
to  begin  with  that  portion,  so  I  helped  with  the  "Great  Adven- 
ture." But  a  practical  test  convinced  me  that  it  could  never 
persuade  a  majority  of  the  people. 

The  single  tax  proposal  is  to  abolish  all  taxes  except  the 
tax  on  land  values.  Then  come  the  associations  of  the  bankers 
and  merchants  and  real  estate  speculators,  crying  in  outraged 
horror,  "What?  You  propose  to  let  the  rich  man's  stocks  and 
bonds  go  free?  You  propose  to  put  no  tax  on  his  cash  in  the 
vaults  and  on  his  wife's  jewels?  You  propose  to  abolish  the 
income  tax  and  the  inheritance  tax,  and  put  all  the  costs  of 
government  on  the  poor  man's  lot  ?" 

Now,  of  course,  I  know  perfectly  well  that  the  rich  man 
dodges  most  of  his  income  tax  and  most  of  his  inheritance 

188 


The  Book  of  Society  189 

tax.  I  know  that  he  pays  a  nominal  pittance  on  his  cash  in  the 
bank  and  on  his  wife's  jewels,  and  likewise  on  his  stocks  and 
bonds.  I  know  that  the  corporations  issuing  these  stocks  and 
bonds  would  be  far  more  heavily  hit  by  a  tax  on  the  natural 
resources  they  own;  they  could  not  evade  this  tax,  and  they 
know  it,  and  that  is  why  they  are  moved  to  such  deep  concern 
for  the  fate  of  the  poor  man  and  his  lot.  I  know  that  the  tax 
on  the  poor  man's  lot  would  be  infinitesimal  in  comparison  with 
the  tax  on  the  great  corporation.  But  how  can  I  explain  all  this 
to  the  poor  man?  To  understand  it  requires  a  knowledge  of 
the  complexities  of  our  economic  system  which  the  voters 
simply  have  not  got. 

How  much  easier  to  take  the  bankers  and  speculators  at 
their  word !  To  answer,  "All  right,  gentlemen,  since  you  like 
the  income  and  inheritance  taxes,  the  taxes  on  stocks  and  bonds 
and  money  and  jewels,  we  will  leave  these  taxes  standing. 
Likewise,  we  assent  to  your  proposition  that  the  poor  man 
should  not  pay  taxes  on  his  lot,  while  there  are  rich  men  and 
corporations  in  our  state  holding  twenty  million  acres  of  land 
out  of  use  for  purposes  of  speculation.  We  will  therefore 
arrange  a  land  values  tax  on  a  graduated  basis,  after  the  plan 
of  the  income  tax ;  we  will  allow  one  or  two  thousand  dollars' 
worth  of  land  exempt  from  all  taxation,  provided  it  is  used  by 
the  owner ;  and  we  will  put  a  graduated  tax  on  all  individuals 
and  corporations  owning  a  greater  quantity  of  land,  so  that  in 
the  case  of  individuals  and  corporations  owning  more  than  ten 
thousand  dollars'  worth  of  land,  we  will  take  the  full  rental 
value,  and  thus  force  all  idle  land  into  the  market." 

Now,  the  provision  above  outlined  would  have  spiked  every 
single  argument  used  by  the  opposition  to  the  "Great  Adven- 
ture" in  California  in  1918;  it  would  have  made  the  real  intent 
of  the  measure  so  plain  as  to  win  automatically  the  additional 
votes  needed  to  carry  the  election.  But  I  tried  for  three  years, 
without  being  able  to  persuade  a  single  one  of  the  "Great 
Adventure"  leaders  to  recognize  this  plain  fact.  The  single 
taxer  has  his  formula,  the  land  values  tax  and  no  other  tax, 
and  all  else  is  heresy.  Actually,  the  president  of  a  big  single 
tax  organization  in  the  East  declared  that  by  the  advocacy  of 
my  idea  I  had  "betrayed  the  single  tax !"  We  may  take  this  as 
an  illustration  of  the  difference  between  dogmatism  and  science 
in  the  strategy  of  the  class  struggle. 

I  first  suggested  my  program  immediately  after  the  war. 


190  Love  and  Society 

with  the  provision  that  the  land  thrown  on  the  market  should  be 
purchased  by  the  state,  and  used  to  establish  co-operative  agri- 
cultural colonies  for  the  benefit  of  returned  soldiers.  But  we 
have  preferred  to  have  our  returned  soldiers  stay  without  work, 
or  to  displace  the  men  and  women  who  had  been  gallantly 
"doing  their  bit."  By  this  means  we  soon  had  five  million  men 
out  of  work,  and  many  other  millions  bitterly  discontented  with 
their  wages.  Again  I  took  up  the  proposition  for  a  graduated 
land  tax,  with  the  suggestion  that  the  money  should  be  used  to 
provide  a  pension,  first  for  every  dependent  man  or  woman 
over  sixty  years  of  age  in  the  country,  and  second  for  every 
child  in  the  country  whose  parents  were  unable  properly  to  sup- 
port it,  whether  because  they  were  dead  or  sick  or  unemployed. 

You  may  note  that  in  advocating  this  program,  you  would 
not  have  to  convert  anybody  to  any  foreign  theories,  nor  would 
you  have  to  use  any  long  words;  you  would  not  have  to  say 
anything  against  the  constitution,  nor  to  break  any  law,  nor  to 
give  occasion  for  patriotic  mobs  to  tar  and  feather  you.  To 
every  poor  man  in  your  state  you  could  say,  "If  you  own  your 
own  house  and  lot,  this  bill  will  lift  the  taxes  from  both,  and 
therefore  it  will  mean  fifty  or  a  hundred  dollars  a  year  in  your 
pocket.  If  you  do  not  own  a  home,  it  will  take  millions  of  idle 
acres  out  of  the  hands  of  the  speculators,  and  break  the  price 
of  real  estate,  so  that  you  can  have  either  a  lot  in  the  city  or  a 
farm  in  the  country  with  ease." 

Furthermore,  you  could  say,  "This  measure  will  have  the 
effect  of  drawing  the  unemployed  from  the  cities  at  once,  and 
so  stopping  the  downward  course  of  wages.  At  the  same  time 
that  wages  hold  firm,  the  cost  of  food  will  go  down,  because 
there  will  be  millions  more  men  working  on  the  land.  In  addi- 
tion to  that,  the  state  will  have  an  enormous  income,  many  mil- 
lions of  dollars  a  year,  taken  exclusively  from  those  who  are 
owning  and  not  producing.  This  money  will  be  expended  in 
saving  from  suffering  and  humiliation  the  old  people  of  the 
country,  who  have  worked  hard  all  their  lives  and  have  been 
thrown  on  the  scrap-heap;  also  in  making  certain  that  every 
child  in  the  country  has  food  enough  and  care  enough  to  make 
him  into  a  normal  and  healthy  human  being,  so  that  he  can  do 
his  share  of  work  in  the  world  and  pay  his  own  way  through 
life." 

I  submit  the  above  measure  to  those  who  believe  that  the 
road  to  social  freedom  lies  by  some  sort  of  land  tax.  But  before 


The  Book  of  Society  191 

you  take  it  up  I  invite  you  to  consider  whether  there  may 
not  be  some  other  way,  even  easier.  There  is  a  homely  old  say- 
ing to  the  effect  that  "molasses  catches  more  flies  than  vinegar" ; 
and  I  am  always  looking  for  some  way  that  will  get  the  poor 
what  they  want,  without  frightening  the  rich  any  more  than 
necessary. 

I  know  a  certain  type  of  radical  whom  this  question  always 
exasperates.  He  answers  that  the  opposition  will  be  equally 
strong  to  any  plan;  the  rich  will  do  anything  for  the  poor 
except  get  off  their  backs — and  so  on.  In  reply  I  mention  that 
among  the  most  ardent  radicals  I  know  are  half  a  dozen  million- 
aires ;  I  know  one  woman  who  is  worth  a  million,  who  pleads 
day  and  night  for  social  revolution,  while  the  people  who  work 
for  her  are  devoted  and  respectful  wage  slaves.  Herbert 
Spencer  said  that  his  idea  of  a  tragedy  was  a  generalization 
killed  by  a  fact.  I  shall  not  sayihat  the  existence  of  millionaire 
Socialists  and  parlor  Bolsheviks  kills  the  theory  of  the  class 
struggle,  but  I  certainly  say  it  compels  us  to  take  thought  of  the 
rich  as  well  as  of  the  poor  in  planning  the  strategy  of  our  cam- 
paign. 

And  manifestly,  if  we  want  to  consider  the  rich,  the  very 
last  device  we  shall  use  is  that  of  a  tax.  Nobody  likes  to  pay 
taxes ;  everybody  agrees  in  classifying  taxes  with  death.  Each 
feels  that  he  is  paying  more  than  his  share  already ;  each  knows 
that  the  government  which  collects  the  tax  is  incompetent  or 
worse.  Stop  and  recall  what  we  have  proven  about  the  "iron 
ring";  the  possibilities  of  production  latent  in  our  society. 
Realize  the  bearings  of  this  all-important  fact,  that  we  can  offer 
to  mankind  a  social  revolution  which  will  make  everybody 
richer,  instead  of  making  some  people  poorer !  Exactly  how  to 
do  this  is  the  next  thing  we  have  to  inquire. 


CHAPTER  LXIX 

THE  CONTROL  OF  CREDIT 

(Deals  with  money,  the  part  it  plays  in  the  restriction  of 
industry,  and  may  play  in  the  freeing  of  industry.) 

How  is  it  that  the  rich  are  becoming  richer?  The  single 
taxer  answers  that  it  is  by  monopoly  of  the  land,  the  natural 
sources  of  wealth ;  the  Socialist  answers  that  it  is  by  the  control 
of  the  machinery  of  production.  But  if  you  go  among  the  rich 
and  make  inquiry,  you  speedily  learn  that  these  factors,  large 
as  they  are,  amount  to  little  in  comparison  with  another  factor, 
the  control  of  credit.  There  are  hosts  of  little  capitalists  and 
business  men  who  deal  in  land  and  produce  goods  with  machin- 
ery, but  the  men  who  make  the  real  fortunes  and  dominate  the 
modern  world  are  those  who  control  credit,  and  whose  business 
is,  not  the  production  of  anything,  but  speculation  and  the 
manipulation  of  markets. 

"Money  makes  the  mare  go,"  our  ancestors  used  to  say; 
and  money  today  determines  the  destiny  of  empires.  What  is 
money  ?  We  think  of  it  as  gold  and  silver  coins,  and  pieces  of 
engraved  paper  promising  to  pay  gold  and  silver  coins.  But  the 
report  of  the  U.  S.  Comptroller  of  the  Currency  for  1919  shows 
that  the  business  of  the  country  was  done,  5%  by  such  means 
and  95%  by  checks ;  so,  for  practical  purposes,  we  may  say  that 
money  consists  of  men's  willingness  to  trust  other  men,  or 
groups  or  organizations  of  men,  when  they  make  written  prom- 
ise to  pay.  In  other  words,  money  is  credit ;  and  the  control  of 
credit  means  the  control  of  industry.  The  problem  of  social 
readjustment  is  mainly  but  the  problem  of  taking  the  control  of 
credit  out  of  the  hands  of  private  individuals,  and  making  it  a 
public  or  social  function. 

Who  controls  credit  today?  The  bankers.  And  how  do  they 
control  it  ?  We  give  it  to  them ;  we,  the  masses  of  the  people, 
who  take  them  our  money  and  leave  it  with  them.  A  very  little 
real  money  in  hand  becomes,  under  our  banking  system,  the 
basis  of  a  great  amount  of  imaginary  money.  The  Federal 
Reserve  law  requires  that  banks  shall  hold  in  reserve  from  seven 

192 


The  Book  of  Society  193 

to  thirteen  per  cent  of  demand  deposits ;  which  means,  in  sub- 
stance, that  when  you  leave  a  dollar  with  a  banker,  the  banker 
is  allowed,  under  the  law,  to  turn  that  dollar  into  anywhere 
from  seven  to  thirteen  dollars,  and  lend  those  dollars  out.  In 
addition,  he  deposits  his  reserves  with  the  Federal  Reserve 
bank,  and  that  bank  keeps  only  thirty-five  per  cent  in  reserve — 
in  other  words,  the  seven  to  thirteen  imaginary  dollars  are  mul- 
tiplied again  by  three. 

Under  the  stress  of  war,  this  process  of  credit  inflation  has 
been  growing  like  the  genii  let  out  of  the  bottle.  Under  the 
law,  the  Federal  Reserve  banks  are  supposed  to  hold  a  gold 
reserve  of  40%  to  secure  our  currency.  But  in  December, 
1919,  these  banks  held  a  trifle  over  a  billion  dollars*  worth  of 
gold,  while  our  paper  money  was  over  four  billion.  In  addi- 
tion, our  banks  have  over  thirty-three  billions  of  deposits,  and 
all  these  are  supposed  to  be  secured  by  gold ;  in  addition,  there 
are  twenty-five  billions  of  government  bonds,  and  uncounted 
billions  of  private  notes,  bonds  and  accounts,  all  supposed  to  be 
payable  in  gold.  So  it  appears  that  about  one  per  cent  of  our 
outstanding  money  is  real,  and  the  rest  is  imaginary — that  is, 
it  is  credit. 

The  point  for  you  to  get  clear  is  this :  The  great  mass  of 
this  imaginary  money  is  created  by  law,  and  we  have  the  power 
to  abolish  it  or  to  change  the  ownership  of  it  at  any  time  we 
develop  the  necessary  intelligence.  Let  us  consider  the  ordinary 
paper  money,  the  one  and  two  and  five  and  ten  dollar  "bills," 
with  which  we  plain  people  do  most  of  our  business.  These 
are  Federal  Reserve  notes,  and  there  are  about  three  billions  of 
them ;  how  do  they  come  to  be  ?  Why,  we  grant  to  the  national 
banks  by  law  the  right  to  make  this  money;  the  government 
prints  it  for  them,  and  they  put  it  into  circulation.  And  what 
does  it  cost  them?  They  pay  one  per  cent  for  the  use  of  the 
money ;  in  some  cases  they  pay  only  one-half  of  one  per  cent ; 
and  then  they  lend  it  to  us,  the  people — and  what  do  they 
charge  us?  The  answer  is  available  in  a  recent  report  of  the 
U.  S.  Comptroller  of  the  Currency,  as  follows : 

"I  have  the  record  of  the  loans  made  by  one  Texas  national 
bank  to  a  hard-working  woman  who  owned  a  little  farm  a  few 
miles  from  town.  She  borrowed,  in  the  aggregate,  $2,375, 
making  about  thirty  loans  during  the  year.  Listen  to  the 
details  of  the  robbery :  $162.50  for  30  days  at  36  per  cent ;  $377. 
for  34  days  at  44  per  cent ;  $620.25  for  23  days  at  77  per  cent ; 


194  Love  and  Society 

$11.  for  30  days  at  120  per  cent ;  $21.50  for  30  days  at  90  per 
cent ;  $33.  for  2  days  at  93  per  cent ;  %27.  for  15  days  at  195  per 
cent ;  $1 10,  for  30  days  at  120  per  cent — that  was  to  buy  a  horse 
for  her  plowing ;  $20  for  48  days  at  187  per  cent ;  $6  for  10 
days  at  720  per  cent ;  $7  for  3  days  at  2,000  per  cent,  and  so  on ; 
every  cent  paid  off  by  what  sweat  and  struggle  only  God 
knows." 

In  Oklahoma,  where  the  legal  rate  of  interest  is  six  per  cent, 
with  ten  per  cent  as  the  maximum  under  special  contract, 
harassed  farmers  paid  all  the  way  from  12  to  2400  per  cent, 
with  40  per  cent  as  the  average.  In  the  case  of  one  bank,  the 
Comptroller  proved  that  not  a  single  solitary  loan  had  been 
made  under  fifteen  per  cent.  He  cited  one  particular  case  that 
he  asked  to  be  regarded  as  typical.  In  the  spring  the  farmer 
went  to  the  bank  and  arranged  for  a  loan  of  $200.  Out  of  his 
necessity  he  was  compelled  to  pay  55  per  cent  interest  charge. 
Unable  to  meet  the  note  at  maturity,  he  had  to  agree  to  100  per 
cent  interest  in  order  to  get  the  renewal.  The  next  renewal  forced 
him  up  to  125  per  cent.  For  four  years  the  thing  went  on,  and 
all  the  drudgery  of  the  father  and  the  mother  and  the  six  chil- 
dren could  never  keep  down  the  terrible  interest  or  wipe  out 
the  principal.  As  a  finish  the  bank  swooped  down  and  sold 
him  out ;  the  wretched  man,  barefoot  and  hungry,  went  to  work 
clearing  a  swamp,  caught  pneumonia  and  died;  the  county 
buried  him,  and  neighbors  raised  a  purse  to  send  the  widow  and 
children  back  to  friends  in  Arkansas. 

This  is  the  thing  called  the  Money  Trust  in  action,  and  this 
is  the  power  we  have  to  take  out  of  private  control.  It  is  our 
first  job,  and  all  other  jobs  are  in  comparison  hardly  worth 
mentioning.    How  are  we  going  to  do  it  ? 

The  farmers  of  North  Dakota  have  shown  one  way.  They 
took  the  control  of  their  state  government  into  their  own  hands, 
and  the  most  important  and  significant  thing  they  did  was  to 
start  a  public  bank.  The  interests  fought  them  tooth  and  nail ; 
not  merely  the  interests  of  North  Dakota,  not  merely  of  the 
Northwest,  but  of  the  entire  United  States.  They  fought  them 
in  the  law  courts,  up  to  the  United  States  Supreme  Court,  which 
decided  in  favor  of  the  people  of  North  Dakota.  Therefore, 
make  note  of  this  vital  fact — the  most  important  single  fact  in 
the  strategy  of  the  class  struggle — every  state  can,  under  the 
constitution,  have  a  public  bank ;  every  city  and  town  can  have 
one,  and  no  court  can  ever  forbid  it ! 


The  Book  of  Society  195 

Therefore,  I  say  to  all  Socialists,  labor  men  and  social 
reformers  of  every  shade  and  variety,  nail  at  the  top  of  your  pro- 
gram of  action  the  demand  for  a  public  bank  in  your  commu- 
nity, to  take  the  control  of  credit  out  of  the  hands  of  specula- 
tors and  use  it  for  the  welfare  of  the  people.  Make  it  your  first 
provision  that  every  dollar  of  public  money  shall  be  deposited 
in  this  bank  and  every  detail  of  public  financing  handled  by 
this  bank;  make  it  your  second  provision  that  the  purpose  of 
this  bank  shall  be  to  put  all  private  banks  out  of  business,  and 
take  over  their  power  for  the  people. 

At  present,  you  understand,  it  is  taken  for  granted  that  the 
first  purpose  of  the  government  is  to  foster  the  private  credit 
system.  Take,  for  example,  the  postal  savings  bank.  The  pri- 
vate banks  fought  this  for  a  generation,  and  finally  they  allowed 
us  to  have  it,  on  condition  that  it  should  be  turned  into  a  device 
for  collecting  money  for  them.  Our  postal  bank  turns  over  all 
its  money  to  the  private  banks,  at  the  grotesque  rate  of  two  per 
cent  interest ;  and  recently  I  read  of  the  director  of  the  postal 
bank  appearing  before  a  convention  of  bankers,  asking  for  some 
small  favor,  and  humbly  explaining  that  it  was  not  his  idea  to 
make  the  postal  bank  a  rival  of  the  private  savings  banks.  Why 
should  he  not  do  so  ?  Let  us  nail  it  to  our  radical  program  that 
the  postal  savings  bank  is  to  fight  for  business,  just  as  do  the 
private  banks,  and  lend  its  funds  direct  to  the  people  on  good 
security. 

Let  our  Federal  banking  system  also  become  the  servant  of 
the  public  welfare,  and  let  its  energy  be  devoted  to  breaking  the 
strangle-hold  of  predatory  finance  on  our  industry.  Let  the 
government  issue  all  money,  and  use  it  for  the  transfer  of 
industry  from  private  into  public  hands.  Do  we  want  to  social- 
ize our  railroads,  our  coal  mines,  our  telegraphs  and  telephones  ? 
Do  we  want  to  buy  them,  in  order  to  avoid  the  wastes  of  civil 
war  and  insurrection  ?  We  have  agreed  that  we  do ;  and  here 
we  have  the  way  of  doing  it.  If  the  bankers  can  create,  out  of 
our  willingness  to  trust  them,  billions  upon  billions  of  imaginary 
money,  then  so  can  we,  the  people  of  the  United  States,  create 
money  out  of  our  willingness  to  trust  ourselves.  And  do  not 
let  anybody  fool  you  for  a  single  second  by  talking  about  "fiat 
money"  and  "inflation  of  the  currency."  If  you  are  paying 
twice  as  much  for  everything  as  you  did  before  the  war,  you 
are  paying  it  because  the  bankers  have  doubled  the  amount  of 
money  in  circulation — for  that  reason  and  that  alone.     That 


196  Love  and  Society 

double  money  the  bankers  own;  the  only  question  now  to  be 
decided  is,  who  is  to  own  the  double  money  that  will  be  created 
tomorrow  ? 

Make  note  of  the  fact  that  it  costs  nothing  to  start  a  public 
bank.  If  you  want  to  put  the  steel  trust  out  of  business  by 
competition,  you  have  several  hundred  thousand  dollars  worth 
of  rolling  mills  and  ore  land  to  buy ;  but  the  banks  can  be  put 
out  of  business  by  nothing  but  a  law.  The  material  parts  of  a 
bank,  the  white  marble  columns  and  bronze  railings  and  mahog- 
any trimmings,  are  as  nothing  compared  with  the  inner  soul  of 
a  bank,  its  control  of  the  life-blood  of  your  business  and  mine ; 
and  this  we  can  have  for  the  taking.  We  can  keep  our  own 
"credit" ;  instead  of  sending  it  to  Wall  Street,  where  speculators 
use  it  to  bleed  us  white,  we  can  set  it  to  building  up  our  own 
community,  under  the  direction  of  officials  whom  we  select. 
Also,  we  can  have  our  gigantic  national  bank,  controlling  all  our 
thirty-three  billions  of  dollars  of  deposits,  and  likewise  the  hun- 
dreds of  billions  of  credit  built  upon  them. 

The  first  time  you  suggest  this  plan  to  a  banker  or  business 
man,  you  will  be  told  that  increase  of  money  by  the  government 
does  not  benefit  labor  or  the  general  consumer ;  "inflation  of  the 
currency"  causes  prices  to  go  up  correspondingly.  To  this  I 
will  furnish  an  effective  reply :  that  at  the  same  time  the  gov- 
ernment issues  new  money,  the  government  will  also  fix  prices ; 
and  then  watch  the  face  of  your  banker  or  business  man  1  If  he 
is  a  man  who  can  really  think,  and  is  not  just  repeating  like  a 
parrot  the  formulas  he  has  learned  from  others,  he  will  perceive 
that  the  combination  of  currency  inflation  and  price-fixing  would 
catch  him  as  the  two  parts  of  a  nut-cracker  catch  a  nut ;  and  he 
will  know  that  you  can  take  the  meat  out  of  him  any  time  you 
please.  He  may  argue  that  it  is  not  fair ;  but  point  out  to  him 
that  it  is  exactly  what  the  big  banks  and  the  trusts  have  been 
doing  to  us  right  along — increasing  the  amount  of  money  in 
circulation,  and  at  the  same  time  raising  the  prices  we  pay  for 
goods,  and  so  taking  out  the  meat  from  us  nuts ! 

We  have  agreed  that  we  do  not  mean  to  be  unfair  either  to 
the  banker  or  the  manufacturer;  we  are  simply  going  to  stop 
their  being  unfair  to  us.  We  are  going  to  convince  them  that 
their  power  to  catch  us  in  a  nut-cracker  is  forever  at  an  end. 
We  allow  them  six  per  cent  on  their  investments,  and  guar- 
antee them  this  by  turning  over  to  them  some  of  our  new 
money — that  is,  government  bonds.    When  we  have  thoroughly 


The  Book  of  Society  197 

convinced  them  that  they  can't  get  any  more,  they  will  take 
these  bonds  and  quit ;  and  thus  simply,  without  violence  or 
destruction  of  property,  we  shall  slide  from  our  present  system 
of  commercial  cannibalism  into  the  new  co-operative  common- 
wealth. 

We  have  had  "cheap  money"  campaigns  in  the  United 
States  many  times,  and  as  this  book  is  written,  it  becomes  evi- 
dent that  we  are  to  have  another.  Henry  Ford  is  advocating 
the  idea,  and  so  is  Thomas  A.  Edison.  The  present  writer 
would  like  to  make  plain  that  in  supporting  such  a  program,  he 
does  it  for  one  purpose,  and  one  only — ^the  taking  over  of  the 
industries  by  the  community.  The  creation  of  state  credit  for 
that  purpose  is  the  next  step  in  the  progress  of  himian 
society;  whereas  the  creation  of  state  credit  for  the  con- 
tinuance of  the  profit  system  is  a  piece  of  futility  amounting 
to  imbecility.  This  distinction  is  fundamental,  and  is  the  test 
by  which  to  judge  the  usefulness  of  any  new  program,  and  the 
intelligence  of  those  who  advocate  it. 


CHAPTER  LXX 

THE  CONTROL  OF  INDUSTRY 

(Discusses  various  programs  for  the  change  from  industrial 
autocracy  to  industrial  democracy.) 

The  program  of  the  railway  workers  for  the  democratic 
management  of  their  industry  is  embodied  in  the  Plumb  plan. 
You  may  learn  about  it  by  addressing  the  weekly  paper  of  the 
railway  brotherhoods,  which  is  called  "Labor,"  and  is  published 
in  Washington,  D.  C.  It  appears  that  our  transportation  indus- 
try can  be  at  once  socialized,  because  of  a  clause  in  the  consti- 
tution which  gives  the  national  government  power  over  "roads 
and  communications."  Through  decades  of  mismanagement 
under  the  system  of  private  greed,  the  railroads  have  been 
brought  to  such  a  financial  condition  that  they  will  be  forced 
into  nationalization,  whenever  we  stop  them  from  dipping  their 
fingers  into  the  public  treasury. 

Under  the  Plumb  plan  the  government  is  to  purchase  the 
roads  from  their  present  owners,  paying  with  government 
bonds.  The  management  is  to  be  under  the  control  of  a  board 
consisting  in  part  of  representatives  of  the  government,  and  in 
part  of  the  workers — ^this  being  a  combination  of  the  methods 
of  Socialism  and  Syndicalism.  The  same  program  can  be 
applied  constitutionally  to  telegraphs  and  telephones,  to  inter- 
state trolley  systems,  express  companies,  oil  pipe  lines,  and  all 
other  means  of  interstate  communication  and  distribution. 

The  Plumb  plan  also  deals  with  coal  and  steel  and  other 
great  industries.  These  could  not  be  nationalized  without  a 
constitutional  amendment,  but  it  appears  that  in  the  majority  of 
the  constitutions  of  the  states  are  provisions  that  all  corporate 
charters  are  held  subject  to  the  power  of  the  legislature  to 
amend,  modify,  or  revoke  the  same.  That  gives  us  a  right  to 
take  over  these  corporations  through  state  action.  The  only 
preliminary  is  to  elect  state  administrations  which  will  represent 
us,  instead  of  representing  the  corporations.  Also,  most  state 
constitutions  contain  the  provision  that  "no  corporation  shall 

198 


The  Book  of  Society  199 

issue  its  stocks  or  bonds,  except  for  money,  labor,  or  property 
actually  received."  The  word  "labor"  gives  the  opening  wedge 
for  the  Plumb  plan.  The  state  can  purchase  these  industries, 
giving  bonds  in  exchange,  and  can  issue  to  the  workers  labor 
stock,  which  stock  will  carry  part  control  of  the  industry. 

Also,  the  railroad  brotherhoods  have  started  their  own  bank, 
in  Cleveland,  Ohio,  and  it  is  proving  an  enormous  success. 
Make  note  of  this  point;  every  large  labor  union  can  have  its 
own  bank,  to  finance  its  industries  and  its  propaganda.  Stop 
and  consider  how  preposterous  it  is  that  the  five  million  organ- 
ized workers  of  the  United  States  should  deposit  their  hundreds 
of  millions  of  savings  in  capitalist  banks,  to  be  used  to  finance 
private  undertakings  which  crush  imions  and  hold  labor  in 
bondage.  Let  every  big  labor  union  have  its  own  building,  its 
own  banking  and  insurance  business,  its  own  vacation  camp  in 
the  country,  its  own  school  for  training  its  future  leaders. 
Also,  let  every  labor  council  in  every  big  city  start  a  labor  daily, 
to  tell  the  workers  the  truth  and  point  the  way  to  freedom.  Let 
every  farmers'  organization  follow  suit;  and  let  these  groups 
get  together,  to  exchange  their  products  upon  a  co-operative 
basis.  Already  the  railway  men  are  arranging  with  the  farm- 
ers, to  buy  the  farm  products  and  distribute  them  co-opera- 
tively ;  they  are  getting  together  with  the  clothing  workers,  to 
have  the  latter  make  clothing  for  them,  and  with  the  shoe- 
workers  to  make  shoes. 

This  is  the  co-operative  movement,  which  has  become  the 
largest  single  industry  in  Great  Britain,  and  is  the  backbone  of 
industrial  democracy  and  sound  radicalism.  It  is  spreading 
rapidly  in  America  now.  It  is  taking  the  money  of  the  people 
out  of  the  control  of  the  profit  system,  and  diverting  it  into 
channels  of  public  service.  It  is  training  men  to  believe  in 
brotherhood  instead  of  in  greed.  It  is  giving  them  business 
experience,  so  that  when  the  time  comes  the  taking  over  of  our 
industrial  machine  will  not  have  to  be  done  by  amateurs,  but  by 
men  who  know  what  co-operation  is,  and  how  to  make  a  success 
of  it. 

This  work  will  go  on  more  rapidly  yet  when  the  workers 
have  united  politically,  and  brought  into  power  a  government 
which  will  assist  them  instead  of  assisting  the  bankers.  A  most 
interesting  program  for  the  development  of  working-class 
financial  credit  is  known  as  the  "Douglas  plan,"  which  is  advo- 
cated by  a  London  weekly,  the  "New  Age,"  and  is  explained  in 


200  Love  and  Society 

two  books,  called  "Economic  Democracy"  and  "Credit  Power 
and  Democracy,"  by  Douglas  and  Orage.  This  program  is  in 
brief  that  the  furnishing  of  credit  shall  become  a  function  of 
organized  labor,  based  upon  the  fact  that  the  true  and  ultimate 
basis  of  all  credit  is  the  power  of  hand  and  brain  labor  to  pro- 
duce wealth.  The  labor  unions,  or  "guilds,"  shall  pay  the  man- 
agement of  industry  and  pay  capital  for  the  use  of  the  industrial 
plant,  and  shall  finance  production  and  new  industrial  develop- 
ment out  of  their  "credit  power,"  their  ability  to  promise  pro- 
duction and  to  keep  their  promises. 

This  "Douglas  plan"  seeks  to  break  the  Money  Trust  by  the 
method  of  Syndicalism.  Another  method  of  breaking  it, 
through  state  regulation  of  bank  loans,  you  will  find  most  com- 
pletely set  forth  in  an  extremely  able  book,  "The  Strangle 
Hold,"  by  H.  C.  Cutting,  an  American  business  man,  whom 
you  may  address  at  San  Lorenzo,  California.  Another  method, 
utilizing  the  third  factor  in  industry,  the  consumer,  is  the 
method  of  banking  by  consumers'  unions.  Such  are  the  Raffei- 
sen  banks,  widely  known  in  Germany,  and  a  specimen  of  which 
exists  in  the  single  tax  colony  at  Arden,  Delaware.  Those  who 
wish  to  know  about  the  co-operative  bank,  or  other  forms  of 
co-operation,  may  apply  to  the  Co-operative  League  of  Amer- 
ica, 2  West  13th  Street,  New  York,  whose  president  is  Dr. 
James  P.  Warbasse.  Information  concerning  public  ownership 
may  be  had  from  the  Public  Ownership  League,  127  N.  Dear- 
born Street,  Chicago ;  also  from  the  Socialist  party,  220  South 
Ashland  Boulevard,  Chicago,  and  from  the  Bureau  of  Social 
Research  of  the  Rand  School  of  Social  Science,  New  York. 

Also,  I  ought  to  mention  the  very  interesting  plan  for  social 
reconstruction  set  forth  by  Mr.  King  C.  Gillette,  inventor  of  the 
safety  razor.  This  plan  you  may  find  in  your  public  library  in 
two  encyclopedic  volumes,  "Gillette's  Social  Redemption,"  and 
"Gillette's  World  Solution."  The  politician  seeks  to  solve  the 
industrial  problem  by  means  of  the  state,  and  the  labor  leader 
seeks  to  solve  it  by  the  unions;  it  is  to  be  expected  that  Mr. 
Gillette,  a  capitalist,  should  seek  to  solve  it  by  means  of  the  cor- 
poration. He  points  out  that  the  modern  "trust"  is  the  greatest 
instrument  of  production  yet  invented  by  man ;  and  he  asks  why 
the  people  should  not  form  their  own  "trust,"  to  handle  their 
own  aflFairs,  and  to  purchase  and  take  over  the  industries  from 
their  present  private  masters.  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  Mr. 
Gillette's  solution  is  fully  as  radical  and  thorough-going  as  those 


The  Book  of  Society  201 

of  the  State  Socialists  or  the  Syndicalists.  The  "People's  Cor- 
poration" which  he  projects  and  plans  some  day  to  launch  upon 
the  world  would  be  a  gigantic  "consumers*  union,"  whose 
"credit  power"  would  speedily  dominate  and  absorb  all  other 
powers  in  modern  society ;  it  would  make  us  all  stockholders, 
and  give  us  our  share  of  the  benefits  of  social  productivity. 


CHAPTER  LXXI 
THE  NEW  WORLD 

(Describes  the  co-operative  commonwealth,  beginning  with 
its  money  aspects;  the  standard  wage  and  its  variations.) 

It  has  been  indicated  that  the  new  society  will  be  different 
in  different  countries  and  in  different  parts  of  the  same  coun- 
try, in  different  industries  and  at  different  times.  No  one  can 
predict  exactly  what  it  will  be,  and  anyone  who  tries  to  predict 
is  unscientific.  But  every  man  can  work  out  his  own  ideas  of 
the  most  economical  and  sensible  arrangements  for  a  co-opera- 
tive society,  and  in  these  final  chapters  I  set  forth  my  ideas. 

One  of  the  first  things  people  ask  is,  "Will  there  be  money 
in  the  new  society,  or  how  will  labor  be  rewarded  and  goods 
paid  for  ?"  I  answer  that  there  will  be  money,  and  the  business 
methods  of  the  new  society  will  be  so  nearly  the  same  as  at 
present  that  in  this  respect  you  would  hardly  realize  there  had 
been  any  change.  The  only  difference  will  be  that  in  the  new 
society  you  will  be  paid  several  times  as  much  for  your  labor ; 
or,  if  you  prefer  to  put  it  the  other  way,  you  will  be  able  to  buy 
several  times  as  much  with  your  money.  Why  should  we  waste 
our  time  working  out  systems  of  "credit-cards,"  when  we 
already  have  a  system  in  the  form  of  gold  and  silver  coins  and 
paper  currency?  Why  should  we  bother  with  "labor  checks," 
when  we  have  a  banking  and  clearing-house  system,  understood 
by  everyone  but  the  illiterate?  The  only  difference  we  shall 
make  is  that  nobody  can  get  gold  and  silver  coins  or  paper  cur- 
rency, except  by  performing  labor  to  pay  for  them;  nobody 
can  have  money  in  the  bank  and  draw  checks  against  it,  until 
he  has  rendered  to  society  an  equivalent  amount  of  service. 

When  you  have  earned  your  money  in  the  new  world,  you 
will  spend  it  wherever  you  please,  and  for  whatever  you  please ; 
the  only  difference  being  that  the  price  you  pay  will  be  the  exact 
labor-cost  of  producing  that  article,  with  no  deduction  for  any 
form  of  exploitation.  As  I  wrote  sixteen  years  ago  in  "The 
"Industrial  Republic,"  you  will  be  able  to  get,  if  you  insist 
upon  it,  a  seven-legged  spider  made  of  diamonds,  and  the  only 

202 


The  Book  of  Society  203 

question  society  will  ask  is,  Have  you  performed  services  equiva- 
lent to  the  material  and  labor  necessary  to  the  creating  of  that 
unusual  article  of  commerce?  Of  course,  society  won't  put  it 
to  you  in  that  complicated  formula;  it  will  simply  ask,  "Have 
you  got  the  price?"  Which,  you  observe,  is  exactly  the  ques- 
tion society  asks  you  at  present. 

The  next  thing  that  everybody  wants  to  know  is,  "Shall  we 
all  be  paid  the  same  wages?"  I  answer,  yes  and  no,  because 
there  will  be  three  systems  of  payment.  There  will  be  a  basic 
wage,  which  everybody  will  get  for  every  kind  of  useful  service 
necessary  to  production ;  this  will  be,  as  it  were,  the  foundation 
of  our  economic  structure.  On  top  of  this  will  be  built  a  system 
of  special  payments  for  special  services,  which  are  of  an  intel- 
lectual nature,  and  cannot  be  standardized  and  dealt  with 
wholesale.  In  addition,  there  will  be  for  a  time  a  third  arrange- 
ment, applying  to  agricultural  work,  which  is  in  a  different 
stage  of  development,  and  to  which  different  conditions  apply. 

Let  us  take,  first,  our  standard  wage.  The  census  of  our 
Utopian  commonwealth  reveals  that  we  have  ten  million  able- 
bodied  workers  engaged  in  mining,  manufacturing,  and  trans- 
portation; this  including,  of  course,  office-work  and  manage- 
ment— everything  that  enters  into  these  industries.  By  scien- 
tific management,  the  best  machinery,  and  the  elimination  of  all 
possible  waste,  we  find  that  they  produce  eighty  million  dollars 
worth  of  goods  an  hour.  A  portion  of  this  we  have  to  set  aside 
to  pay  for  the  raw  materials  which  they  do  not  produce,  and 
for  the  upkeep  of  the  plant,  and  for  margin  of  error — what  our 
great  corporations  call  a  surplus.  We  find  that  we  have  fifty 
million  dollars  per  hour  left,  and  that  means  that  we  can  pay 
for  labor  five  dollars  per  hour,  or  twenty  dollars  for  the  regular 
four-hour  day.  This  is  our  standard  wage,  received  by  all  able- 
bodied  workers. 

But  quickly  we  find  that  our  industries  are  not  properly  bal- 
anced. A  great  many  men  want  to  work  at  the  jobs  which  are 
clean  and  pleasant,  such  as  delivering  mail,  and  very  few  want 
to  work  at  washing  dishes  in  restaurants  and  cleaning  the  sew- 
ers. There  is  no  way  we  can  adjust  this,  except  by  paying  a 
higher  wage,  or  by  reducing  the  number  of  hours  in  the  work- 
ing day,  which  is  the  same  thing.  The  only  other  method  would 
be  to  have  the  state  assign  men  to  their  work,  and  that  would 
be  bureaucracy  and  slavery,  the  essence  of  everything  we  wish 
to  get  away  from  in  our  co-operative  commonwealth. 


204  Love  and  Society 

What  we  shall  have,  so  far  as  concerns  our  basic  industries, 
is  a  government  department,  registering  with  mathematical 
accuracy  the  condition  of  supply  and  demand  in  all  the  indus- 
tries of  the  country.  Our  demand  for  shoes  is  increasing,  for 
some  reason  or  other ;  a  thousand  more  shoe-workers  are  needed, 
therefore  the  price  of  labor  in  the  shoe  industry  is  increased 
five  cents  per  day — or  whatever  amount  will  draw  that  number 
of  workers  from  other  occupations.  On  the  other  hand,  there 
are  too  many  people  applying  for  the  job  of  driving  trucks, 
therefore  we  reduce  slightly  the  compensation  for  this  work. 
There  are  more  men  who  want  jobs  in  Southern  California  than 
in  Alaska,  therefore  the  payment  for  the  same  grade  of  work  in 
Alaska  has  to  be  higher.  AH  this  is  not  merely  speculation,  it  is 
not  a  matter  of  anybody's  choice ;  it  is  an  automatic,  self-adjust- 
ing system,  subject  to  precise  calculations.  The  only  change 
from  our  present  system  is  from  guesswork  to  exact  measure- 
ment. At  present  we  do  not  know  how  many  shoes  our  country 
will  require  next  season,  neither  do  we  know  how  many  shoes 
are  going  to  be  made,  neither  do  we  know  how  many  people  can 
make  shoes,  nor  how  many  would  like  to  learn,  nor  how  many 
would  like  to  quit  that  job  and  take  to  farming.  It  would  be 
the  simplest  matter  in  the  world  to  find  out  these  things — far 
simpler  that  it  was  to  register  all  our  possible  soldiers,  and 
examine  them  physically  and  mentally,  and  train  them  and 
ieed  them  and  ship  them  overseas  to  "can  the  Kaiser." 

Of  course,  we  drafted  the  men  for  this  war  job ;  but  in  the 
new  world  nobody  is  drafted  for  anything.  It  is  any  man's 
privilege  to  starve  if  he  feels  like  it ;  it  is  his  privilege  to  go  out 
into  the  mountains  and  live  on  nuts  and  berries  if  he  can  find 
them.  Nobody  makes  him  go  anywhere,  or  makes  him  work  at 
anything — unless,  of  course,  he  is  a  convicted  criminal.  To  the 
free  citizen  all  that  society  has  to  say  is,  if  he  buys  any  prod- 
ucts, he  must  pay  for  those  products  with  his  own  labor,  and 
not  with  some  other  man's  labor.  Of  course,  he  may  steal,  or 
cheat,  as  under  capitalism;  our  new  world  has  laws  against 
stealing  and  cheating,  and  does  its  best  to  enforce  them.  The 
difference  between  the  capitalist  world  and  our  world  is  merely 
that  we  make  it  impossible  for  any  man  to  get  money  legally 
without  working. 

Under  these  conditions  the  average  man  wishes  to  work, 
and  the  only  question  remaining  is,  how  shall  he  work?  If  he 
wants  to  work  by  himself,  and  in  his  own  way,  nobody  objects 


The  Book  of  Society  205 

to  it.  He  is  able  to  buy  anything  he  pleases,  whether  raw 
materials  or  finished  products.  If  he  wants  to  buy  leather  and 
make  shoes  after  his  own  pattern,  no  one  stops  him,  and  if  he 
can  find  anyone  to  buy  these  shoes,  he  can  earn  his  living  in  that 
way.  He  is  able  to  get  land  for  as  long  a  time  as  he  wants  it,  by 
paying  to  the  state  the  full  rental  value  of  that  land,  and  if  he 
wants  to  farm  the  land,  he  can  do  so,  and  sell  his  products.  As 
a  matter  of  theory,  he  is  perfectly  free  to  hire  others  to  farm 
the  land  for  him,  or  with  him.  There  is  no  law  to  prevent  it, 
neither  is  there  any  law  to  prevent  his  renting  a  factory  and 
buying  machinery,  and  hiring  labor  to  make  shoes. 

But,  as  a  matter  of  practical  fact,  it  is  impossible  for  him  to 
do  this,  because  the  community  is  in  the  business  of  making 
shoes,  and  on  an  enormous  scale,  with  great  factories  run  demo- 
cratically by  the  workers,  and  there  is  very  small  chance  of  any 
private  business  man  being  able  to  draw  the  workers  away  from 
these  factories.  The  community  factories  have  all  the  latest 
machinery ;  they  apply  the  latest  methods  of  scientific  manage- 
ment, and  they  turn  out  standard  shoes  at  such  a  rate  that  pri- 
vate competition  is  unthinkable.  Of  course,  there  may  be  some 
special  kind  of  shoes,  involving  an  intellectual  element,  in  which 
there  can  be  private  competition.  This  kind  of  manufacture  is 
covered  in  our  second  method  of  payment ;  but  before  we  dis- 
cuss it,  let  us  settle  the  problem  of  our  most  important  basic 
industry,  which  is  agriculture. 


CHAPTER  LXXII 
AGRICULTURAL  PRODUCTION 

(Discusses  the  land  in  the  new  world,  and  how  we  foster 
co-operative  farming  and  co-operative  homes.) 

Farming  the  land  is  a  very  ancient  industry,  and  while  its 
tools  have  been  improved,  its  social  forms  have  been  the  same 
for  a  long  time.  The  worker  on  the  land  is  conservative,  and 
the  Russian  Bolsheviks,  who  tried  to  rush  their  peasants  into 
Communism,  found  that  they  had  only  succeeded  in  stopping 
the  production  of  food.  We  make  no  such  blunder  in  our  new 
society.  We  have  found  a  way  to  abolish  speculation  in  land, 
and  exploitation  based  on  land-ownership,  while  leaving  the 
farmer  free  to  run  his  business  in  the  old  way  if  he  wants  to. 

In  our  new  society  we  take  the  full  rental  value  of  all  land 
•which  is  not  occupied  and  used  by  the  state.  The  farmer  and 
the  city  dweller  alike  "own"  their  land,  in  the  sense  that  they 
have  the  use  of  it  for  as  long  as  they  please,  but  they  pay  to  the 
state  the  rental  value  of  the  land,  minus  the  improvements.  So 
they  cannot  speculate  in  the  land  or  rent  it  out  to  others ;  they 
can  only  use  it,  and  they  only  pay  for  what  they  actually  use. 
They  may  put  improvements  on  the  land,  with  full  assurance  of 
having  the  use  and  benefit  thereof,  and  they  may  sell  the 
improvements,  and  the  new  owner  enters  into  possession,  with 
no  obligation  but  to  pay  the  rental  value  of  the  unimproved  land 
to  the  state. 

The  farmer  goes  on  raising  his  products,  and  if  he  wants 
to  drive  to  town  and  deliver  them  to  his  customers,  he  may  do 
so;  but  he  finds  it  cheaper  to  market  them  through  the  great 
labor  co-operatives  and  state  markets.  As  there  is  no  longer 
any  private  interest  involved  in  these  activities,  no  one  has  any 
interest  in  cheating  him,  and  he  gets  the  full  value  of  the  prod- 
ucts, less  the  cost  of  marketing.  If  the  farmer  wishes  to  con- 
tinue all  his  life  in  his  old  style  individualistic  method  of  work- 
ing the  land,  he  is  free  to  do  so.  But  here  is  what  he  sees  going 
on  within  a  few  miles  of  his  place : 

The  state  has  bought  a  square  mile  of  land,  and  has  taken 
down  the  fences  and  established  an  agricultural  co-operative  for 

206 


The  Book  of  Society  207 

purposes  of  experiment  and  demonstration.  The  farm  is  run 
under  the  direction  of  experts ;  the  soils  are  treated  with  exactly 
the  right  fertilizers  for  each  crop,  the  best  paying  crops  are 
raised,  the  best  seed  is  used,  and  the  best  machinery.  The  work- 
ers of  this  new  agricultural  co-operative  receive  the  standard 
wage,  and  they  live  in  homes  specially  built  for  them,  with  all 
the  conveniences  made  possible  by  wholesale  production.  Also, 
these  co-operators  live  in  a  democratic  community;  they  deter- 
mine their  ov/n  conditions  of  labor,  being  represented  on  the 
governing  board,  along  with  the  experts  appointed  by  the  state. 

The  farmer  watches  this  experiment,  at  first  with  suspicion ; 
but  he  finds  that  his  sons  have  less  suspicion  than  he  has,  and 
his  sons  keep  pointing  out  to  him  that  their  little  farm  is  not 
making  the  standard  wage  or  anything  like  it ;  and,  moreover, 
the  standard  wage  is  constantly  increasing,  whereas,  the  price 
of  farm-products  is  dropping.  And  here  is  the  state,  reaay  to 
direct  new  co-operative  ventures,  inviting  a  score  of  farmers  in 
the  community  to  combine  and  buy  out  the  unwilling  ones,  and 
establish  a  new  co-operative.  Sooner  or  later  the  old  farmer 
gives  way ;  or  he  dies,  and  his  sons  belong  to  the  new  world. 

So  ultimately  we  have  our  national  agricultural  system,  in 
which  all  the  requirements  of  our  people  are  studied,  and  all  the 
possibilities  of  our  soil  and  climate,  and  the  job  of  raising 
the  exact  quantities  of  food  that  we  need,  both  for  our  own  use 
and  for  export,  is  worked  out  as  one  problem.  We  know  how 
much  lumber  we  need,  and  we  raise  it  on  all  our  hillsides  and 
mountain  slopes,  and  so  protect  ourselves  from  floods  and  the 
denuding  of  our  continent.  We  know  where  best  to  raise  our 
wheat,  and  where  best  to  raise  our  potatoes  and  our  cabbages, 
and  we  do  not  do  this  by  crude  hand-labor,  nor  by  the  labor  of 
women  and  children  from  daybreak  till  dark.  We  have  special 
machines  that  plant  each  crop,  and  other  machines  that  reap  it 
or  dig  it  out  of  the  ground  and  prepare  it  for  market. 

A  few  days  ago  I  read  a  discussion  in  the  Chamber  of  Com- 
merce of  Calcutta.  Some  one  called  attention  to  the  wastes 
involved  in  the  current  method  of  handling  rubber.  One  con- 
signment of  rubber  had  been  sold  more  than  three  hundred 
separate  times,  and  the  cost  of  these  transactions  amounted  to 
three  times  the  value  of  the  rubber.  This  is  only  one 
illustration,  and  I  might  quote  a  thousand.  If  you  doubt  my 
figures  as  to  the  possibility  of  production  in  the  new  society, 
remind  yourself  that  a  large  percentage  of  the  things  you  use 


208  LoYE  AND  Society 

have  been  bought  and  sold  many  scores  of  times  before  you  get 
them.  Consider  the  cabbage,  for  which  you  pay  six  or  eight 
cents  a  pound  in  the  grocery  store,  and  for  which  the  farmer 
gets,  say,  half  a  cent  a  pound. 

In  this  new  world  the  state  has  an  enormous  income,  derived 
from  its  tax  on  land  values.  It  no  longer  has  to  send  around 
men  once  a  year  to  ask  you  how  many  diamond  rings  your  wife 
has,  and  to  tax  you  on  your  honesty,  if  you  have  any.  It  no 
longer  has  to  make  its  money  by  such  lying  devices  as  a  tariff, 
therefore  its  moral  being  is  no  longer  poisoned  by  a  tariff -lobby. 
It  taxes  every  citizen  for  the  right  to  use  that  which  nature 
created,  and  leaves  free  from  taxation  that  which  the  citizens' 
own  labor  created ;  this  kind  of  taxation  is  honest,  and  fair  to 
all,  because  no  one  can  evade  it.  The  state  uses  the  proceeds  of 
this  land  tax  in  the  public  services,  the  libraries  and  research 
laboratories  and  information  bureaus ;  in  free  insurance  against 
fire  and  flood  and  tempest ;  and  in  a  pension  to  every  member  of 
society  above  the  working  age  of  fifty-five,  or  below  the  work- 
ing age  of  eighteen.  Of  course,  the  state  might  leave  it  to  every 
man  to  save  up  for  his  old  age,  but  not  all  men  are  this  wise, 
and  the  state  cannot  afford  to  let  the  unwise  ones  starve.  It  is 
more  convenient  for  the  state  to  figure  that  all  men,  or  nearly 
all,  are  going  to  be  old,  and  to  hold  back  some  of  their  money 
while  they  are  young  and  strong,  in  the  certainty  that  when  they 
are  old,  they  will  appreciate  this  service.  Also  the  state  takes 
care  of  the  sick  and  incapacitated,  and  the  mentally  or  physi- 
cally defective.  But  we  do  not  leave  these  latter  loose  m  the 
world  to  reproduce  their  defects;  we  have  in  our  new  world 
some  sense  of  responsibility  to  the  future,  and  there  is  nothing 
to  which  we  devote  more  effort  than  making  certain  that  noth- 
ing unsound  or  abnormal  is  allowed  entrance  into  life. 

The  problem  of  the  care  of  children  is  a  complicated  one, 
and  our  new  society  is  in  process  of  solving  it.  We  look  back 
on  the  old  world  in  which  the  having  of  children  was  heavily 
taxed,  in  the  form  of  an  obligation  to  care  for  these  children 
until  they  were  old  enough  to  work.  Then  the  parents  were 
allowed  to  exploit  the  labor  of  the  children,  so  that  among  the 
very  poor  the  raising  of  children  was  a  business  speculation, 
like  the  raising  of  slaves  or  poultry.  But  in  our  new  world  we 
consider  the  interest  of  the  child,  and  of  the  society  in  which 
that  child  is  to  be  a  citizen.  We  decide  that  this  society  must 
have  citizens,  and  that  the  raising  of  the  future  citizens  is  a 


The  Book  of  Society  209 

work  just  exactly  as  necessary  and  useful  as  the  raising  of  a 
crop  of  cabbages.  Therefore,  we  pay  a  pension  to  all  mothers 
while  they  are  raising  and  caring  for  children.  At  the  same 
time  we  assert  the  right  to  see  that  this  money  is  wisely  spent, 
and  that  the  child  is  really  cared  for.  If  it  is  neglected,  we  are 
quick  to  take  it  away  from  its  parents,  and  put  it  in  one  of  our 
twenty-four-hour-a-day  schools. 

We  realize  that  the  home  is  an  ancient  industry,  even  more 
ancient  than  agriculture,  and  we  do  not  try  to  socialize  it  all  at 
once.  But  just  as  we  demonstrate  to  farmers  that  the  indi- 
vidual farm  does  not  pay,  so  we  demonstrate  to  mothers  the 
wastefulness  of  the  single  laundry,  the  single  kitchen,  the  single 
nursery.  We  establish  community  laundries,  community  kitch- 
ens, community  nurseries,  and  invite  our  women  to  help  in 
these  activities,  and  to  learn  there,  under  expert  guidance,  the 
advantages  of  domestic  co-operation.  We  convince  them  by 
showing  better  results  in  the  health  and  happiness  of  the  chil- 
dren, and  in  the  time  and  strength  of  the  mothers.  So,  little  by 
little,  we  widen  the  field  of  co-operative  endeavor,  and  increase 
the  total  product  of  human  labor  and  the  total  enjoyment  o£ 
human  life. 


CHAPTER  LXXIII 

INTELLECTUAL  PRODUCTION 

(Discusses  scientific,  artistic  and  religious  activities,  as  a 
superstructure  built  upon  the  foundation  of  the  standard  wage.) 

Karl  Kautsky,  intellectual  leader  of  the  German  Social- 
democracy,  gives  in  his  book,  "The  Social  Revolution,"  a  useful 
formula  as  to  the  organization  of  the  f uttu-e  society.  This  for- 
mula is :  "Communism  in  material  production,  Anarchism  in 
intellectual  production."  It  vi^ill  repay  us  to  study  this  state- 
ment, and  see  exactly  what  it  means. 

Material  production  depends  directly  upon  things;  and  as 
there  is  only  a  limited  quantity  of  things  in  the  world,  if  any 
one  person  has  more  than  his  share,  he  deprives  some  other 
person  to  that  extent.  So  there  have  to  be  strict  laws  concern- 
ing the  distribution  of  material  products.  But  with  intelloc- 
tual  things  exactly  the  opposite  is  the  case.  There  is  no  limit  in 
quantity,  and  aiiy  one  person  can  have  all  he  wants  without 
interfering  with  anybody  else.  Everybody  in  the  world  can 
perform  a  play  by  Shakespeare,  or  play  a  sonata  by  Beethoven, 
and  everybody  can  enjoy  it  as  much  as  he  pleases  without  keep- 
ing other  people  from  enjoying  it  all  they  please.  Also,  mate- 
rial production  can  be  standardized ;  we  can  have  great  facto- 
ries to  turn  out  millions  of  boxes  of  matches,  each  match  like 
every  other  match,  and  the  more  alike  they  are  the  better.  But 
in  intellectual  affairs  we  want  everyone  to  be  different,  or  at 
least  we  want  everyone  to  be  free  to  be  different,  and  if  some 
one  can  become  much  better  than  the  others,  this  is  the  most 
important  kind  of  production  in  the  world,  for  he  may  make 
over  our  whole  intellectual  and  moral  life. 

Por  the  production  of  material  things  our  new  society  has 
great  factories  owned  in  common,  and  run  by  majority  vote  of 
the  workers,  and  we  place  the  products  of  that  factory  at  the 
disposal  of  all  members  of  society  upon  equal  terms.  That  is  our 
"Communism  in  material  production."  On  the  other  hand,  in 
our  intellectual  production  we  leave  everybody  free  to  live  his 
own  life,  and  to  associate  himself  with  others  of  like  aims,  and 
we  place  as  few  restrictions  as  possible  upon  their  activities. 

210 


The  Book  of  Society  211 

This  is  the  method  of  free  association,  or  "Anarchism  in  intel- 
lectual production." 

Our  problem  would  be  simple  if  material  and  intellectual 
production  never  had  to  mingle.  But,  as  it  happens,  every  kind 
of  intellectual  production  requires  a  certain  amount  of  material, 
and  every  kind  of  material  production  involves  an  intellectual 
element.  Therefore,  our  two  methods  have  to  be  combined,  and 
we  have  a  complex  problem  which  we  have  to  solve  in  a  variety 
of  different  ways,  and  upon  which  we  must  experiment  with 
open  minds  and  scientific  temper. 

First,  let  us  take  the  intellectual  elements  involved  in  the 
production  of  purely  material  things,  such  as  matches  and 
shoes  and  soap.  Let  us  take  invention.  Naturally,  we  do  not 
want  to  go  on  making  matches  and  shoes  and  soap  in  the  same 
old  way  forever.  On  the  contrary,  we  want  to  stimulate  all  the 
workers  in  these  industries  to  use  their  wits  and  improve  the 
processes  in  every  possible  way.  The  whole  of  society  has  an 
interest  in  this,  and  the  soap  workers  have  an  especial  interest. 
Our  soap  industry  has  an  invention  department,  with  a  group 
of  experts  appointed  by  the  executive  committee  of  the  national 
council  of  soap  workers.  All  soap  workers  are  taxed,  say  five 
cents  a  day,  for  the  support  of  this  activity.  Likewise  the  state 
contributes  a  generous  sum  out  of  its  income  toward  the  work 
of  soap  research.  In  addition  to  this,  the  soap  industry  offers 
prizes  and  scholarships  for  suggestions  as  to  the  improvement 
of  every  detail  of  the  work,  and  at  meetings  of  every  local  of 
soap  workers  somebody  m^es  new  suggestions  as  to  methods 
of  stimulating  their  intellectual  life — not  merely  as  regards 
soap,  but  as  regards  citizenship,  and  art  and  literature,  and 
human  life  in  general.  Our  soap  workers,  you  must  under- 
stand, are  no  longer  wage-slaves,  brutalized  by  toil  and  poverty ; 
they  are  free  citizens  of  a  free  society.  Our  soap  workers'  local 
in  every  city  has  its  own  theatre  and  concert  hall  and  lecture 
bureau,  and  publishes  its  own  magazine. 

Every  industry  has  its  immediate  intellectual  problems,  its 
trade  journals  in  which  these  are  discussed,  and  its  research 
boards  in  which  they  are  worked  out.  The  ambitions  of  the 
young  workers  in  that  industry  are  concentrated  upon  getting 
into  this  intellectual  part  of  their  trade.  Examinations  are  held 
and  tests  are  made  to  discover  the  most  competent  men,  and 
written  suggestions  are  considered  by  boards  of  control.  It  is, 
of  course,  of  great  importance  to  every  worker  that  the  chan- 


212  Love  and  Society 

nels  of  promotion  should  be  kept  open,  and  that  the  man  who 
really  has  inventive  talent  shall  get,  not  merely  distinction  and 
promotion,  but  financial  reward,  so  that  he  may  have  time  and 
materials  to  continue  his  experiments. 

This  research  department,  you  perceive,  is  a  sort  of  super- 
structure, built  upon  the  foundation  of  our  standard  wage ;  and 
this  same  simile  applies  to  numerous  other  forms  of  intellectual 
production.  For  example,  our  community  paper  mills  turn  out 
paper,  and  our  community  printers  are  prepared  to  turn  out 
millions  of  books.  How  shall  we  determine  what  is  to  be  the 
intellectual  content  of  these  material  books?  There  are  many 
different  methods.  First,  there  is  the  method  of  individualism. 
A  man  has  something  to  say,  and  he  writes  a  book ;  he  works  in 
the  soap  factory,  and  saves  a  part  of  his  standard  wage,  and 
when  he  has  money  enough  he  orders  the  community  printers 
to  print  his  book,  and  the  community  booksellers  to  handle  it 
for  him,  and  the  community  postofifice  to  deliver  it  for  him. 
Again,  a  group  of  men  organize  themselves  into  an  association, 
or  club,  or  scientific  society,  and  publish  books.  The  Authors' 
League  takes  up  the  work  of  publishing  the  writings  of  its 
members,  and  the  Poetry  Society  does  the  same. 

This  is  the  method  of  Anarchism,  or  free  association.  But 
there  is  no  reason  why  we  should  not  have  along  side  it  the 
method  of  Socialism;  there  is  no  reason  why  we  should  not 
have  state  publishing  houses,  just  as  we  have  state  universities 
and  state  libraries.  The  state  should  certainly  publish  standard 
■works  of  all  sorts,  bibles  and  dictionaries  and  directories,  and 
cheap  editions  of  the  classics.  In  this  new  world  our  school 
boards  are  not  chosen  by  business  men  for  purposes  of  graft, 
they  are  chosen  by  the  people  to  educate  our  children;  so  it 
seems  to  us  perfectly  natural  that  the  National  Educational 
Association  should  conduct  a  publication  department,  and  order 
the  printing  of  the  school  books  which  the  children  use. 

In  the  same  way,  anyone  is  free  to  write  a  play,  or  to  put 
on  a  play,  and  invite  people  to  come  and  see  it.  But,  like  the 
individual  farmers  and  the  individual  mothers  of  families,  the 
play-producer  in  our  society  is  in  competition  with  great  com- 
munity enterprises,  which  set  a  high  standard  and  make  com- 
petition difficult.  The  same  thing  applies  to  the  opera,  and  to 
concerts,  and  to  all  the  arts  and  sciences.  You  can  start  a  pri- 
vate hospital  if  you  wish,  but  you  will  be  in  competition  with 
public  institutions,  and  you  can  only  succeed  if  you  are  a  man 


f 


The  Book  of  Society  213 

of  genius — ^that  is,  if  you  have  something  to  teach,  too  new  and 
startling  for  the  public  boards  of  control  to  recognize.  You  try 
your  new  method,  and  it  works,  and  that  becomes  a  criticism  of 
the  public  boards  of  control,  and  before  long  the  people  by  their 
votes  turn  out  the  old  board  of  control  and  put  you  in. 

That  is  politics,  you  say ;  but  we  in  our  new  world  do  not 
use  the  word  politics  as  one  of  contempt.  We  really  believe 
that  public  sentiment  is  in  the  long  run  the  best  authority,  and 
the  appeal  to  public  sentiment  is  at  once  a  social  privilege  and  a 
social  service.  What  we  strive  to  do  is  to  clear  the  channels  of 
appeal,  and  avoid  favoritism  and  stagnation.  To  that  end  we 
maintain,  in  every  art  and  every  science  and  every  department 
of  human  thought,  endless  numbers  of  centers  of  free,  inde- 
pendent, co-operative  activity,  so  that  every  man  who  has  an 
inspiration,  or  a  new  idea,  can  find  some  group  to  support  him 
or  can  form  a  new  group  of  his  own. 

This  is  our  "Anarchism  in  intellectual  production,"  and  it  is 
the  method  under  which  in  capitalist  society  men  organize  all 
their  clubs  and  societies  and  churches.  Devout  members  of  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church  will  be  startled  to  be  told  that  theirs  is 
an  Anarchist  organization ;  but  nevertheless,  such  is  the  case. 
The  Catholic  Church  owns  a  great  deal  of  property,  and  specu- 
lates in  real  estate,  and  to  that  extent  it  is  a  capitalist  institu- 
tion. It  holds  a  great  many  people  by  fear,  and  to  that  extent 
it  is  a  feudal  institution.  But  in  so  far  as  members  of  the 
church  believe  in  it  and  love  it  and  contribute  of  their  free  will 
to  its  support,  they  are  organizing  by  the  method  which  all 
Anarchists  recommend  and  desire  to  apply  to  the  whole  of 
society.  Anarchist  clubs  and  Christian  churches  are  both  free 
issociations  for  the  advocacy  of  certain  ideas,  the  only  differ- 
^ce  being  in  the  ideas  they  advocate. 

In  our  new  world  such  organizations  have  been  multiplied 
many  fold,  and  form  a  vast  superstructure  of  intellectual  activ- 
ity, built  upon  the  foundation  of  the  standard  wage.  In  this 
new  world  all  the  people  are  free.  They  are  free,  not  merely 
from  oppression,  but  from  the  fear  of  oppression ;  they  have 
leisure  and  plenty,  and  they  take  part  naturally  and  simply  in 
the  intellectual  life.  The  old,  of  course,  have  not  got  over  the 
dullness  which  a  lifetime  of  drudgery  impressed  upon  them, 
but  the  young  are  growing  up  in  a  world  without  classes,  and  in 
which  it  seems  natural  that  everyone  should  be  educated  and 
everyone  should  have  ideas.    They  earn  their  standard  wage, 

16 


214  Love  and  Society 

and  devote  their  spare  time  to  some  form  of  intellectual  or 
artistic  endeavor,  and  spend  their  spare  money  in  paying  writers 
and  artists  and  musicians  and  actors  to  stimulate  and  entertain 
them. 

These  latter  are  the  ways  of  distinction  in  our  new  society ; 
these  are  the  paths  to  power.  The  only  rich  men  in  our  world 
are  the  men  who  produce  intellectual  goods ;  the  great  artists, 
orators,  musicians,  actors  and  writers,  who  are  free  to  serve  or 
not  to  serve,  as  they  see  fit,  and  can  therefore  hold  up  the  public 
for  any  price  they  care  to  charge.  Just  now  there  is  eager  dis- 
cussion going  on  in  our  world  as  to  whether  it  is  proper  for  an 
opera  singer,  or  a  moving  picture  star,  or  a  novelist,  to  make  a 
million  dollars.  Our  newspapers  are  full  of  discussions  of  the 
question  whether  anyone  can  make  a  million  dollars  honestly, 
and  whether  men  of  genius  should  exploit  their  public.  Some 
point  out  that  our  most  eminent  opera  singer  spends  his  mil- 
lions in  endowing  a  conservatory  of  art;  but  others  maintain 
that  it  would  be  better  if  he  lowered  his  prices  of  admission, 
and  let  the  public  use  its  money  in  its  own  way.  The  extre- 
mists are  busy  founding  what  they  call  the  Ten-cent  Society, 
whose  members  agree  to  boycott  all  singers  and  actors  who 
charge  more  than  ten  cents  admission,  and  all  moving  picture 
stars  who  receive  more  than  a  hundred  thousand  dollars  a  year 
for  their  service.  These  "Ten-centers"  do  not  object  to  paying 
the  money,  but  they  object  to  the  commercializing  of  art,  and 
declare  especially  that  the  moral  effect  of  riches  is  such  that  no 
rich  person  should  ever,  under  any  circumstances,  be  allowed 
to  influence  the  youth  of  the  nation.  In  this  some  of  the  great- 
est writers  join  them,  and  renounce  their  copyrights,  and  agree 
to  accept  a  laureateship  from  some  union  of  workers,  who  pay 
them  a  generous  stipend  for  the  joy  and  honor  of  being  associ- 
ated with  their  names.  The  greatest  poet  of  our  time  began  life 
as  a  newsboy,  and  so  the  National  Newsvenders'  Society  has 
adopted  him,  and  taken  his  name,  and  pays  him  ten  thousand 
dollars  a  year  for  the  privilege  of  publishing  his  works. 


CHAPTE-R  LXXIV 
MANKIND  REMADE 

(Discusses  human  nature  and  its  weaknesses,  and  what  hap- 
pens to  these  in  the  new  world.) 

We  have  briefly  sketched  the  economic  arrangements  of 
the  co-operative  commonweahh.  Let  us  now  consider  what  are 
the  effects  of  these  arrangements  upon  the  principal  social  dis- 
eases of  capitalism. 

The  first  and  most  dreadful  of  capitalism's  diseases  is  war, 
and  the  economic  changes  here  outlined  have  placed  war,  along 
•with  piracy  and  slavery,  among  the  half-forgotten  nightmares 
of  history.  We  have  broken  the  "iron  ring,"  and  are  no  longer 
dependent  upon  foreign  concessions  and  foreign  markets  for 
the  preservation  of  our  social  system  and  the  aggrandizement 
of  a  ruling  class.  We  can  stay  quietly  at  home  and  do  our  own 
work,  and  as  we  produce  nearly  everything  we  need,  we  no 
longer  have  to  threaten  our  neighbors.  Our  neighbors  know 
this,  and  therefore  they  do  not  arm  against  us,  and  we  have  no 
pretext  to  arm  against  them.  We  take  toward  all  other  civilized 
nations  the  attitude  which  we  have  taken  toward  Canada  for 
the  past  hundred  years. 

We  have  a  small  and  highly  trained  army,  a  few  regiments 
of  which  are  located  at  strategic  points  over  the  country.  This 
army  we  regard  and  use  as  we  do  our  fire  department.  When 
there  is  widespread  damage  by  fire  or  flood  or  storm  or  earth- 
quake, we  rush  the  army  to  the  spot  to  attend  to  the  work  of 
rescue  and  rebuilding.  Also,  we  have  a  small  navy  in  interna- 
tional service ;  for,  of  course,  we  are  no  longer  an  independent 
and  self-centered  nation ;  we  have  come  to  realize  that  we  are 
part  of  the  world  community,  and  have  taken  our  place  as  one 
state  in  the  International  Socialist  Federation.  We  send  our 
delegates  to  the  world  parliament,  and  we  place  our  resources 
at  the  disposal  of  the  world  government.  However,  it  now 
takes  but  a  small  army  and  navy  to  preserve  order  in  the  world. 
We  govern  the  backward  nations,  but  the  economic  arrange- 
ments of  the  world  are  such  that  we  are  no  longer  driven  to 
exploit  and  oppress  them.    We  send  them  teachers  instead  of 

215 


216  Love  and  Society 

soldiers,  and  as  there  are  really  very  few  people  in  the  world 
who  fight  for  the  love  of  fighting,  we  have  little  difficulty  in  pre- 
serving peace.  We  pay  the  backward  peoples  a  fair  price  for 
their  products  which  we  need.  Our  world  government  takes  no 
money  out  of  these  countries,  but  spends  it  for  the  benefit  of 
those  who  live  in  the  countries,  to  teach  them  and  train  their 
young  generations  for  self-government. 

Next,  what  are  the  eflfects  of  our  new  arrangements  upon 
political  corruption  and  graft?  The  social  revolution  has 
broken  the  prestige  of  wealth.  Money  will  buy  things,  but  it  no 
longer  buys  power,  the  right  to  rule  other  men;  it  no  longer 
buys  men's  admiration.  Everybody  now  has  money,  and 
nobody  is  any  longer  afraid  of  starvation.  It  is  no  longer  the 
fashion  to  save  money — any  more  than  it  is  the  fashion  to  carry 
revolvers  in  drawing-rooms  or  to  wear  chain  mail  in  place  of 
underclothing.  So  our  political  life  is  cleansed  of  the  money 
influence.  People  now  get  power  by  persuading  their  fellows, 
not  by  buying  them  or  threatening  them.  The  world  is  no 
longer  full  of  men  ravenous  for  jobs,  and  ready  to  sell  their 
soul  for  a  "position."  So  it  is  no  longer  possible  to  build  up  a 
"machine"  based  on  desire  for  office. 

The  changes  have  resulted  in  an  enormous  intensification  of 
our  political  activities.  We  hare  endless  meetings  and  debates ; 
we  have  so  many  propaganda  societies  that  we  cannot  keep 
track  of  them.  And  some  of  these  societies,  like  the  Catholic 
Church,  have  a  large  membership,  and  large  sums  of  money  at 
their  disposal.  But  a  few  experiments  at  carrying  elections  by 
a  "campaign-chest"  have  convinced  everybody  that  to  have  the 
facts  on  your  side  is  the  only  permanent  way  to  political  power. 
Our  new  society  is  jealous  of  attempts  to  establish  any  sort  of 
ruling  class,  and  the  surest  way  to  discredit  yourself  is  to  advo- 
cate any  form  of  barrier  against  freedom  of  discussion,  or  the 
right  of  the  people's  will  to  prevail. 

Next,  what  is  the  status  of  crime?  We  have  too  recently 
escaped  from  capitalism  to  have  been  able  to  civilize  entirely 
our  slum  population,  and  we  still  have  occasional  crimes  of  vio- 
lence, especially  crimes  of  passion.  But  we  have  almost  entirely 
eliminated  those  classes  of  crime  which  had  to  do  with  property, 
and  we  have  discovered  that  this  was  ninety-five  per  cent  of  all 
crime.  We  have  eliminated  them  by  the  simple  device  of  mak- 
ing them  no  longer  profitable.  Anybody  can  go  into  our  com- 
mimity  factories,  and  under  clean  and  attractive  working  condi- 


The  Book  of  Society  217 

tions,  and  without  any  loss  of  prestige  or  social  position,  can 
earn  the  means  of  satisfying  his  reasonable  wants  by  three 
hours  work  a  day.  Almost  everybody  finds  this  easier  than 
stealing  or  cheating. 

But  more  important  yet,  as  a  factor  in  abolishing  crime,  is 
the  abolition  of  class  domination  and  the  prestige  of  wealth. 
We  no  longer  Have  in  our  community  a  ruling  class  which  lives 
without  working,  and  which  offers  to  the  weak-minded  and 
viciously  inclined  the  perpvetual  example  of  luxury.  We  no 
longer  set  much  store  on  jewels  and  fine  raiment;  we  do  not 
make  costly  things,  except  for  public  purposes,  where  all  may 
enjoy  them;  and  nobody  stores  great  quantities  of  money, 
because  everyone  has  a  guarantee  of  security  from  the  state. 
So  we  are  gradually  putting  our  policemen  and  jailers  and 
judges  and  lawyers  to  constructive  work. 

Next,  what  about  disease?  The  diseases  of  poverty  are 
entirely  done  away  with.  We  are  now  able  to  apply  the  knowl- 
edge of  science  to  the  whole  community,  and  so  we  no  longer 
have  to  do  with  tuberculosis  and  typhoid,  or  with  rickets  and 
anaemia  in  children,  or  with  heavy  infant  mortality.  We  have 
sterilized  our  unfit,  the  degenerates  and  the  defectives,  and  so 
do  not  have  to  reckon  with  millions  of  children  from  these 
wretched  stocks.  We  now  give  to  the  question  of  public  health 
that  prominence  which  in  the  old  days  we  used  to  give  to  war 
and  the  suppression  of  crime  and  social  protest.  Our  public 
health  officers  now  replace  our  generals  and  admirals,  and  we 
really  obey  their  orders. 

Next,  as  to  prostitution.  Just  as  in  the  case  of  crime,  we 
are  still  too  close  to  capitalism  not  to  have  among  us  the  victims 
of  social  depravity,  both  men  and  women.  We  still  have  a  great 
deal  of  vice  which  springs  from  untrained  animal  impulse,  and 
we  have  some  cultivated  and  highly  sophisticated  pornography. 
But  we  have  entirely  done  away  with  commercial  vice,  and  we 
have  done  it  by  cutting  the  root  which  nourished  it.  Women  in 
our  communities  are  really  free ;  and  by  that  we  do  not  mean 
the  empty  political  freedom  which  existed  in  the  days  of  wage 
slavery — we  mean  that  women  are  permanently  delivered  from 
economic  inferiority,  by  the  recognition  on  the  part  of  the  state 
of  the  money  value  of  their  special  kind  of  work,  the  bearing 
and  training  of  children.  This  kind  of  work  not  merely 
receives  the  standard  wage,  it  also  receives  the  best  surgical  and 
nursing  treatment  free.     Housework  and  home-making  are 


218  Love  and  Society 

legally  recognized  services;  and  the  woman  before  marriage 
and  after  her  children  have  been  nursed  is  free  to  go  into  the 
community  factories  and  earn  for  herself  the  standard  wage, 
with  no  loss  of  social  position.  Consequently,  no  woman  sells 
her  sex,  and  no  man  buys  it. 

This  does  not  mean,  of  course,  that  we  have  solved  the  sex 
problem  in  our  new  society.  There  are  two  great  social  prob- 
lems with  which  we  have  to  deal,  the  first  of  these  being  the  sex 
problem,  and  the  second  the  race  problem.  Our  scientists  are 
occupied  with  eugenics,  and  we  are  finding  out  how  to  guide 
our  young  people  in  marriage,  so  that  our  race  may  be  built  up, 
and  the  ravages  of  capitalism  remedied  as  quickly  as  possible. 
Also  we  are  trying  to  find  out  the  laws  of  happiness  and  health 
iia  love.  We  are  founding  societies  for  the  purpose  of  pro- 
tecting love,  and,  as  hinted  in  the  Book  of  Love,  we  have  a 
determined  social  struggle  between  two  groups  of  women — ^the 
mother-women  and  the  mistress-women — ^those  who  take  love 
gravely,  as  a  means  of  improving  the  race,  and  those  who  take 
it  as  a  decoration,  a  form  of  play.  Our  men  are  embarrassed 
by  having  to  choose  between  these  groups,  and  occupy  them- 
selves with  trying  to  keep  the  struggle  from  turning  into  civil 
war. 

Second,  the  race  problem.  Our  economic  changes  have,  of 
course,  done  away  with  some  of  the  bitterest  phases  of  this 
strife.  White  workingmen  in  the  North  no  longer  mob  and 
murder  negro  workingmen  for  taking  their  jobs,  and  in  the 
South  our  land  values  tax  prevents  the  landlord  from  exploiting 
either  white  or  negro  labor.  But  our  white  race  is  still  irresisti- 
bly bent  upon  preserving  its  integrity  of  blood,  and  the  more 
far-seeing  among  the  negroes  have  come  to  realize  that  there 
can  never  be  any  real  happiness  for  them  in  a  society  where 
they  are  denied  the  higher  social  privileges.  There  is  a  move- 
ment for  the  development  of  a  genuine  Negro  Republic  in 
Africa,  and  for  mass  emigration.  Also  there  is  a  proposition, 
soon  to  be  settled  at  an  election,  for  the  dividing  of  the  United 
States  into  three  districts  upon  racial  lines.  First,  there  are  to 
be,  in  the  Far  South,  three  or  four  states  which  are  inhabited 
and  governed  solely  by  negroes,  and  to  which  white  men  may 
come  only  as  temporary  visitors ;  a  large  group  of  states  in  the 
North  which  are  white  states,  and  to  which  negroes  may  come 
only  as  visitors ;  and  finally,  a  middle  group  of  states,  in  which 
both  whites  and  black  are  allowed  to  live,  as  at  present,  but  with 


The  Book  of  Society  219 

the  proviso  that  no  one  may  live  there  who  takes  part  in  any 
form  of  racial  strife  or  agitation.  This  program  gives  to  race- 
conscious  negroes  their  own  land,  their  own  civilization,  their 
own  chance  of  self-realization ;  it  gives  to  race-conscious  white 
men  the  same  opportunity ;  and  it  leaves  to  those  who  are  not 
troubled  by  the  problem,  a  country  where  black  and  white  may 
dwell  in  quiet  good  fellowship. 

Finally,  what  has  been  the  effect  of  our  economic  changes 
upon  the  purely  personal  vices  which  gave  us  so  much  trouble 
and  unhappiness  in  the  old  days  ?  What,  for  example,  has  been 
the  effect  upon  vanity  ?  You  should  see  our  new  crop  of  chil- 
dren in  our  high  schools!  There  are  no  longer  any  social 
classes  among  them ;  the  rich  ones  do  not  arrive  in  private  auto- 
mobiles, to  make  the  poor  ones  envious,  and  they  do  not  isolate 
themselves  in  little  snobbish  cliques.  They  arrive  in  community 
automobiles,  and  all  wear  uniforms — one  of  the  simple  devices 
by  which  we  repress  the  impulse  of  the  young  toward  display 
of  personal  egotism.  They  are  all  full  of  health  and  happy 
play,  and  their  heads  are  busily  occupied  with  interesting  ideas. 
Our  girls  are  trained  to  thinking,  instead  of  to  personal  adorn- 
ment ;  they  are  developing  their  minds,  instead  of  catching  a 
rich  husband  by  sexual  charms.  So  we  have  been  able,  in  a  sin- 
gle generation  of  training,  to  make  a  real  and  appreciable  differ- 
ence in  the  amount  of  vanity  and  self -consciousness  to  be  found 
among  our  young  people. 

And  the  same  thing  applies  to  a  score  of  other  undesirable 
qualities,  which,  under  the  system  of  competitive  commercial- 
ism, were  overstimulated  in  human  beings.  In  those  old  days 
everyone  was  seeking  his  own  survival,  and  certain  qualities 
which  had  survival  value  became  the  principal  characteristics  of 
our  race.  Those  qualities  were  greed  and  persistence  in  acquisi- 
tiveness, cunning  and  subtlety,  also  bragging  and  self-assertive- 
ness.  In  that  old  world  people  destroyed  their  fellows  in  order 
to  make  their  own  safety  and  power;  they  wasted  goods  in 
order  to  be  esteemed,  to  preserve  what  they  called  their  "social 
position."  But  now  we  have  cut  the  roots  of  all  these  vile 
weeds.  We  have  so  adjusted  the  business  relationships  of  men 
that  we  do  not  have  to  have  hysterical  religious  revivals  in  order 
to  keep  the  human  factors  alive  in  their  hearts.  We  have  estab- 
lished it  as  a  money  fact,  which  everyone  quickly  realizes,  that 
it  pays  better  to  co-operate ;  there  is  more  profit  and  less  bother 
in  being  of  service  to  others.    So  we  have  prepared  a  soil  in 


220  Love  and  Society 

which  virtues  grow  instead  of  vices,  and  we  find  that  people 
become  decent  and  kindly  and  helpful  without  exhortation,  and 
with  no  more  moral  effort  than  the  average  man  can  comfort- 
ably make.  Of  course,  we  have  still  personal  vices  to  combat, 
and  new  virtues  to  discover  and  to  propagate ;  but  this  has  to  do 
with  the  future,  whereas  we  are  here  confining  ourselves  to 
those  things  which  have  been  demonstrated  in  our  new  society. 


INDEX 


Abortion   61 

Abortions    30 

Advertising  163 

Agricultural  co-operative 206 

Anarchism 210 

Anarchist    89,  90 

Anarchy 172 

Anglo-Saxon   62,  111 

"Appeal  to   Reason" 149 

Aristocratic  doctrine  116 

Armour 128 

Atherton,   Gertrude 87 

Babies 63 

Bachelorhood  52 

Bacon,    Francis 51 

Banking  system   192 

Bankruptcy  162 

Barbarism  124 

Barnum,  P.  T 27 

Berkman,  Alexander   173 

Biology 103 

Birth  control  61,  76 

Birth  Control  Review 64 

Blatchford,  Robert 55,  161 

"Blind"  love 58 

Bolsheviks  172 

Breach  of  promise  suit 91 

Brothel  66 

Brothels    31 

Burbank,  Luther  99 

Business  man 143 

Capital   158 

Capitalism 136,  168 

Capitalists  142 

Carnegie    168 

Catholic  Church  213.  216 

Celibacy  51,  52,  64 

Chastity   51 

Chattel  slavery 186 

Childbirths   70 

Children    70,  72,  85,  208 

Christianity    115,  133 

"Clarion"   31 

Class  struggle  133,  177 


Clay,  Henry   186 

Coleridge  85 

"Collier's  Weekly" 122,  163 

Committee  on  Waste 160 

Commune 129 

Communism    10,  170,  210 

Compensation  179 

Competition   108,  127 

Competitive  wage  system 148 

"Complex"    49 

Comstock,  Anthony 20 

Confiscation    179 

Congress   138 

Contraception  61 

Co-operation  109,  199,  200 

Coquetry   38 

Corporation 127 

Courtship 91 

Credit    152,  154,  192,  200 

Credit-cards   202 

Crime 164,  216 

Culture    62 

Cutting,  H.  C 200 

Dances  15 

Debs,   Eugene   V 155 

Degeneration    121 

"Demi-monde"  80 

Democratic  doctrine 115 

Dictatorship    180,  183,  185 

Dill,  James  B 25 

Disarmament   157 

Discouragement   164 

Disease 217 

Divorce    32,  93,  97 

Double  standard 5 

"Douglas  plan"  199 

"Dumping"  152 

Economic  evolution  123 

Economic  man  108 

Emerson 186 

Emulation   112 

Engagements    72 

England  120,  156,  175 

Eugenics   58 


221 


222 


Index 


Evolution 122 

Exogamy  105 

Exploitation   181 

Exploiting   148 

Exports  153 

Factory  system  129 

Farming  206 

"Favorable  balance"   151 

Fear  122,  164 

Federal  Reserve  Act 154 

Feminist    69 

Feudal  stage   124 

Fires  163 

Foreign  trade    151 

"Free  love"   44.  87 

"Free  lover" 92 

France    175 

France,   Anatole 44 

Freud  104 

Gens  9 

Germany  155,  156 

Gillette,  King  C 200 

Goldman,  Emma  173 

Gonorrhea   30 

Goode,  Mary  J 41 

Government 166 

"Graft"  127,  216 

"Great  Adventure" 188 

Hammurabi    78 

*'Hamon  case" 26 

"Hard  times" 144 

Hardy    13 

Harris,  Frank 21 

"High  life" 23 

Home 42,  209 

HonejTnoon 56 

Hoover,   Herbert    160 

House  of  Commons 137 

Huguenots  134 

Human  nature 99 

Himger 122 

Meals   132 

Imports 153 

Income  tax 143,  188 

Industrial  evolution  126 


Infant  103 

Infanticide 61 

Inflation 196 

Inheritance  tax   188 

"Ingenues"    19 

Instinct    57 

Insurance  163 

Intellectual  production 211 

"Iron  ring"  158 

Island  145 

I.  W.  W 169 

James,  William 16 

Jealousy  89 

Jews  127 

Kautsky,  Karl  210 

"King  Coal"    139 

Kropotkin    109,  129,  173 

Labor  158 

Labor  checks  202 

Labor  union  199 

Laissez  faire   110 

Land  tax  190 

Land  titles   179 

Land  values 208 

Late  marriage 67 

Lecky 6,  Z7> 

Leviticus   78 

Liberty  motor  164 

London,  Jack 62 

Los  Angeles  Times 157 

Love  2>^,  47,  100,  112,  218 

Lust   48 

Luther,  Martin  129 

Luxiu-y 60 

Machinery  149 

"Magic  gestures" 104 

Magna  Charta  134 

Malthusian  law 108 

Markham,  Edwin  139 

Marquesas  Islands ZZ 

Marriage  4 

Marriage  club 71 

Marriage   market 68 

Marx,  Karl 132,  138,  176 

Materialistic    interpretation . . .  132 


Index 


223 


Material  production 210 

Maternity  endowment 79 

Meredith,  George 43 

"Merrie  England"   161 

Metchnikoff,  Elie  23,  46 

Mexico  121 

Middle  class 176,  186 

Minor,  Robert  173 

Mistress 12 

Money    37,  192,  202 

Money  Trust  194 

Monogamy    5,  83,  90 

jMoors 134 

Moralists   59 

Morgan    128 

Mother's    pension 79 

Moving  pictures 17 

Negro  218 

Negroes   116 

Neuroses   105 

Neurotics  103 

North  Dakota 194 

North,  Luke 188 

O'Brien,  Frederick 10 

Oedipus  complex 104 

"Open-shop"  177 

Panic   154 

Parasitism  74 

Passion    58 

Permanence    87 

Piracy Ill 

Pity    74 

Plumb  plan 198 

Political  evolution   123 

Political  revolution   125 

Politics 213 

Pornography 20 

Postal   savings  bank 195 

Poverty   40 

Primitive  man 9 

Privilege   36 

Professor  Sumner  122 

Profit  system 148,  158 

"Progressive  polygamy" 90 

Proletariat 142 

Promiscuity    87 

Property  marriage 44 


Prosperity  144 

Prostitute    6 

Prostitution   4,  31,  41,  217 

Proudhon 179 

Psycho-analysis 49,  103 

Public  bank 194 

Publishing  212 

Quick,  Herbert  165 

Race  prejudice 62 

Race  problem 218 

Racial  immaturity   116 

Raflfeisen  bank 200 

Reeve,  Sidney  A 160 

Republic 125 

Research   212 

"Resurrection" 53 

Revolt 134 

Ricardo 108 

Richardson,  Dorothy 26 

Ring  148 

Robinson,  Dr.  William  J, 

21,30,70,77 

Roman  Catholic  church 90 

"Romance" 91 

"Romantic"  love 55 

Roosevelt    61 

Rulers 119 

Russia   129,  185 

Sanger,   Margaret 63 

School  of  marriage 75 

Selection   8 

Sex  8 

Sex  education 72 

Sex  impulse 46 

Sex  problem 218 

Sex  urge 86 

Sex  war 81 

Shelley    59,  89 

"She-towns"  29 

Shop  management 168 

Sienkiewicz  13 

Sims,  District  Attorney 28 

Single  tax 188 

Slavery 10,  126,  136 

"Smart   set" 24 

Smith,  Adam  108 

Snobbery  61 


224 


Index 


Socialism  166 

Social  revoluton 128,  147,  175 

Soviets 130,  171 

"Speeding  up"  138 

Spencer,  Herbert   122 

Spirituality   64 

Sport 113 

Standard  wage 203 

Steel   Trust   137 

Stopes,  Dr.  Marie  C 11 

Strikes  162 

Syndicalism 167 

Syphilis   30 

Tabu 9 

Tariff  153 

'Taxes  191 

Tennyson    38,  120 

"The  Brass  Check" 31,  137 

"The  Conquest  of  Bread"....  173 
"The  Cost  of  Competition"..  160 
"The  Industrial  Republic"....  202 

"The  Jungle"    139 

"The  Lady" 12 

"The  Long  Day"  26,  29 

"The  Nature  of  Man" 33 

"The  Profits  of  Religion"....   137 

"The  Social  Revolution" 210 

"The  Strangle  Hold" 200 


Thompson,  A.  M 31 

Tolstoi  S3 

"Totem  and  Taboo"   104 

"Triangle"    56 

Unconscious    105 

Unemployment 147 

"Vamps" 19 

Vanity    219 

Varietism    85 

Venereal  disease  30,  67,  83 

Voltaire  36 

Voluntary  Parenthood  League    64 

War 162 

Wars 155 

Waste  165 

Wells,  H.  G 89 

Wharton,   Edith    95 

"Wild  oats" 6 

White  man's  burden 117 

White,  William  Allen 17 

Worker    140 

Workers 176 

Working  class  140 

IWoman    12 

"Young  love" 56.  73 


/oi  ^4/ 


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